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The Concept of Schizophrenia and the Various Proposals for its Causes and Treatment.

Schizophrenia is complex disease; a disorder of thinking characterized by a variety of symptoms affecting human cognition, emotions, and behavior. It is common for schizophrenic patients to experience unstable perceptions such as delusions and hallucinations, which are commonly recognized as positive symptoms, and negative symptoms which concern losses or lack in emotions, apathy, or desire (Birchwood, Jackson; 2001). German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin and Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler contributed vastly to the understanding of the basis of schizophrenia, although it has been shown that Kraepelin's concepts of schizophrenia were found to be incorrect. Bleuler's theories on the other hand, provide a basis of the contemporary understanding of schizophrenia that is now widely accepted. Over the decades, speculations of what causes schizophrenic symptoms have been widely researched; most interestingly it has been recently found that schizophrenia may be transmitted through genetic inheritance. As with the search for causes of schizophrenia, the treatment and management for this group of related disorders is also a chase for current medical physicians. Drug therapies are currently used in controlling schizophrenic symptoms, in conjunction with psychotherapies.

Since the discovery of schizophrenic-like symptoms, many concepts have been put forward by experts researching into this disorder. Although Eugen Bleuler and Emil Kraepelin have proposed concepts of schizophrenia that were different, both approaches have benefited recent psychiatrists in understanding the basis of schizophrenia. While father of psychiatry' Kraepelin (1856-1926) provides a conceptual outline that describes the current known term of schizophrenia as dementia praecox', or premature mental deterioration, Bleuler (1857-1939) saw schizophrenia as a loosening of associations in mental functions. Kraepelin believed that the negative symptoms such as abnormalities in cognition and emotion, were the underlying primary abnormality in schizophrenia (Andreasen; 1997), and perceived schizophrenia as a deterioration of mental functions (Cancro; 1970). In contrast, Bleuler interpreted schizophrenia quite differently. He suggested that the main feature of the disorders appear to be splitting or loss of association between several groups of various mental functions, to which he applied the term schizophrenia. Bleuler rejected

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