Schizoaffective Disorder is a mental health condition characterized by symptoms of schizophrenia, such as hallucinations and delusions, combined with mood disorder symptoms, like depression or mania. It’s considered a rare condition and can be complex to manage due to the combination of psychotic and mood symptoms.
Symptoms of Schizoaffective Disorder include:
Delusions: false beliefs that are not true.
Hallucinations: hearing voices or seeing things that aren’t there.
Depression: a profound sense of sadness, intrusive thoughts, feeling upset, feeling there is no future at all, anxiety and panic attacks.
Mania: elevated mood, increased energy, and sometimes hyperactivity such as hypomania (mild mania) and hypermania (severe mania).
Schizoaffective disorder is different to schizophrenia in that it combines features of schizophrenia with mood disorder symptoms. While schizophrenia primarily involves psychotic symptoms like hallucinations, delusions, and disordered thinking, schizoaffective disorder also includes mood-related symptoms such as episodes of depression or mania. It makes treatment far more difficult. Schizoaffective disorder is more complex to diagnose and treat.
Treatment options for Schizoaffective disorder typically involves a combination of medication that are more commonly prescribed to bipolar disorder sufferers.
Medications: antipsychotics to manage psychotic symptoms such as Olanzapine and Quetiapine, mood stabilizers to manage up and down mood swings such as Lamotrigine and occasionally antidepressants such as Fluoxetine (antidepressants, however, can cause manic episodes so must be prescribed cautiously).
Psychotherapy: cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) or talking therapy such as counselling.
Hospitalization: necessary in severe cases or during crisis periods. Schizoaffective disorder is a chronic and severe illness. Being sectioned and admitted into hospital is unfortunately quite common. If the sufferer has hypermania, electro convulsive therapy (ECT) can be helpful - I have had 10 episodes of ECT and it really helped. ECT, however, can be anxiety provoking. (See https://www.arisemorningsun.com/post/electroconvulsive-therapy-it-works) for an article on ECT.
Some people with schizophrenia only will find that medication alone is all that is needed to treat their hallucinations and delusions completely. I have a friend who suffered a schizophrenic attack but after just one month of treatment on Olanzapine in hospital he has never heard voices ever again. Yet on the other side I have another friend with schizophrenia who has untreatable voices. It is not understood why some people can be treated and make a full recovery whilst other people can’t. Clozapine is usually prescribed for treatment resistant bipolar, schizophrenia and Schizoaffective disorder.
Schizoaffective disorder is harder to treat than schizophrenia or bipolar and is perhaps more severe. Little is known if there are links between schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, depression, bipolar or even ADHD. They overlap in some respects. They are likely to be genetic but “unlocked” by environmental factors such as stressors and life events. Unfortunately our understanding of biochemistry is just in its infancy...
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