Below are copied sections from "The Broken Brain - The Biological Revolution in Psychiatry" by Nancy C. Anderson on schizophrenia.
Chapter 4
What is Mental Illness?:
Four Major Syndromes
The Schizophrenic Disorders
When people think of "mental illness" or "being crazy," they are usually thinking of some form of schizophrenia. The person who walks along the street looking rather disheveled and muttering to himself is typically a schizophrenic. So is the person who is suspicious, defensive, and thinks people are after him and trying to harm or persecute him. Some schizophrenics, in spite of their illness, have enough charisma to convince other people of their delusional beliefs. Jim Jones, the leader of the Jonestown Massacre, was probably a schizophrenic. Some schizophrenics live in a fantasy world, absorbed in unreal relationships with people they scarcely know, but unable to have real relationships with people who are actually close to them, such as members of their own family. Such was the case with John Hinckley. Very infrequently schizophrenics may commit violent crimes, as did Hinckley and David Berkowitz. Since these violent crimes tend to get a great deal of attention from the media, people sometimes get the erroneous idea that most schizophrenics are violent. Usually they are not, although they tend to be quite unpredictable.
...Most people who develop schizophrenia do so at a relatively young age, and their intellectual and emotional capacities deteriorate steadily and inexorably as the disease progresses.
...Approximately 1 person in 100 suffers from schizophrenia.
...People who have it tend to pile up in mental hospitals. It has been estimated that 30 percent of the hospital beds (all hospital beds--not just psychiatric beds) in the United States are occupied by people suffering from schizophrenia.
...The term schizophrenia was coined by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who recognized that not all patients who had dementia praecox actually deteriorated into a demented state. He chose a new name, schizo-phrenia, to refer to the "splitting of the mind" that occurs in these patients.
Schizophrenia is a very complicated illness, and patients suffering from it may be very different from one another. Some may be bothered primarily by hallucinations, others by disturbances in their thinking, and others by an abnormality of emotional responsiveness. Further, the symptoms in any individual patient may change over the course of time. The following are two case histories of very different forms of schizophrenia.
pg 51-54
Roger Wallis is at present forty-two. He lives in a state hospital and has been there more or less continuously since the death of his last surviving parent five years ago.
It is difficult to say when his problems really began. Even when he was a young child, his family noticed that he was extremely shy and rather withdrawn. Although he was clearly attached to them and depended on them when he was a young child, he did not enjoy hugging, kissing, and other expressions of affection the way the rest of their children did. When he entered school, he tended to be solitary. He was an average student, but his parents considered him bright and creative because he read a great deal, had a large vocabulary, and enjoyed various intellectual games such as crossword puzzles or math puzzles. He was also preoccupied with inventing things. While in high school, he invented a new alphabet that was supposed to be more phonetically functional than the one currently in use. Although he tried to explain its basic principles to a number of people, no one seemed able to understand it. For a time, his parents were unable to decide whether he was sometimes difficult to understand because he was so much smarter than they, or whether his thinking was simply disorganized.
He completed high school with average grades. He did not participate in any school activities, had no friends, and never went out on a date. He began college, but dropped out with failing grades after the end of the first semester. He returned home and lived with his parents. In spite of repeated efforts to get him out of the house and into various types of jobs, ranging from library clerk to janitor, he was never able to persist and perform any task in a dependable manner. He became increasingly absorbed in a fantasy world and spent much of his time involved in "intergalactic communication." He received messages from an unknown galaxy in a special language that only he was able to understand. These messages, which he heard as if they were voices talking to him inside his head, would describe events in the distant galaxy of Atan. While he was in his twenties, he appeared to enjoy telling his parents about Atan, its local politics, and the people who lived there.
pg 57-58
Each of these examples of schizophrenia is an oversimplification, in that neither describes fully the wide range or symptoms and outcomes that may occur in schizophrenia.
pg 59
Delusions and hallucinations are the most colorful kinds of symptoms. A delusion is defined as a "fixed false belief." Delusions of persecution (or paranoia) are perhaps the commonest kind.
...A person suffering from persecutory delusions is often difficult to deal with because she is suspicious, guarded, and irratable or angry.
...Danger lurks around every corner, and almost anyone might be involved in the conspiracy.
...Jim Jones was probably such a charismatic paranoid.
Delusions may also take other forms. Sometimes patients have gradiose delusions, such as believing that they have special abilities or powers, although this tends to occur more commonly in mania. Delusions may be religious in nature.
...Friends, relatives, and doctors must always use the patient's religious and cultural background as an aid in deciding whether a particular religious idea is a pathological delusion or an understandable belief, as well as whether the religious idea improves the patient's ability to function or interferes with it. Sometimes delusions are fantastic or bizarre. Delusions of this type suggest a more severe or serious case of illness. Roger's delusions were clearly fantastic. Further types of bizarre delusions that occur fairly commonly in schizophrenia include the belief that thoughts are being implanted in one's mind, that belief that thoughts are stolen from one's mind, the feeling that others can hear one's thoughts aloud, or the belief that one's feelings and actions are controlled by some alien or outside force.
People suffering from schizophrenia also frequently experience various kinds of hallucinations. Hallucinations are defined as abnormal perceptions, such as hearing voices, seeing visions, or experiencing unusual sensations in one's body. Hearing voices (auditory hallucination) is easily the most common kind. The voices may be familiar or unfamiliar, male or female, single or multiple. They may comment on what the patient is doing or make mocking and derisive remarks. Early in the illness, patients tend to find their voices troubling or annoying. After a few years, they may be less bothered by them.
pg 60-61
Source:
Nancy C. Andreasen, M.D., Ph.D., The Broken Brain: (Perennial Library, 1985).