How can you tell if someone has schizophrenia?

Answer 1

Although it is hard to tell for certain whether or not someone has schizophrenia, there are some warning signs that you can see. These include:

• Social isolation
• Not showing emotion
• Not taking care of yourself
• No longer enjoying activities that were previously enjoyed
• Having problems at school or work
• Talking about hearing or seeing things that other people do not see or hear
• Having strange beliefs that other people do not have
• Changing mood quickly

The best and only sure way to tell that someone has schizophrenia is to have them see a psychiatrist for a diagnosis. It is hard to tell if someone has schizophrenia or not because many of the symptoms of schizophrenia are either very general (doing poorly at school or work) or may not be shared with other people (hallucinations, delusions).

Answer 2

Simplest way to answer this is:-

YOU CAN'T.

Schizophrenics commonly have what is known as a lack of insight, this is the lack of belief that they are suffering from a mental illness and that their perceptions are real and everyone else does not understand them.

Answer 3

It's important to know that Schizophrenics do NOT always talk to themselves. They may but you can't depend on that. People that talk to them selves are mostly people with Split Personality Disorder. The truth is, you can never really tell. Since there are multiple types of Schizophrenia and everyone is different, you can't be certain.

Answer 4

Schizophrenia is characterized mostly by negative symptoms. These include apathy, wanting to be alone, feeling strange around others, low energy, depression, anhedonia. The positive symptoms, such as hallucinations, are much rarer.

Answer 5

There is an accurate test you can download, answer truthfully and you'll get an accurate result.

http://www.download3k.com/Install-Schizophrenia-Symptoms-Test.html

If the test comes out positive you should see a psychiatrist (NOT a psychologist)
I strongly recommend the anti psychotic "Seroquel" it works wonders for me.

You will probably be prescribed Risperal, Risperdal has much worse side effects including severe anxiety and sexual dysfunction.

Best of luck

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It is essential that any serious disease, mental or physical, be diagnosed and treated by professionals. If you believe you might be schizophrenic, see your doctor, who will refer you to the appropriate specialist if necessary. Don't leave it too long, ring the doctor for an appointment right away so you may either set your mind at rest or commence treatment.

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Answer 6

You probably wouldn't know unless they were having an episode where they were anxious about being watched by certain people. They might be getting strange messages or hearing voices telling them to act in a certain way. It would be easier if you knew the person well because they might be anxious about current affairs that are actually happening but have a strange slant on it. They would need to trust you in order to tell you all the fears that they had going on inside their head.

It is more likely to happen after a major life event like the death of a parent or grandparent and if they are young could be after their first encounters with marijuana.

Answer 7

In medicine, it’s called “malingering” if a patient is trying to deceive someone by faking, feigning or exaggerating symptoms.

Doctors try to discover fakers the same way that people good at detecting lies discover liars. They look for inconsistencies, or things that don’t quite match.

For instance, if a supposed schizophrenic can tell you clearly and without confusion that they’re extremely confused, their actions don’t correspond with what they are saying. A very confused person can’t clearly say how confused they are.

Or, if they act mentally disorganized while talking with a psychiatrist, yet later they can play Chess with another patient, something doesn’t match.

It’s considered an advanced skill to detect a malingering schizophrenic, because a psychiatrist must know in detail the difference between real and fake psychotic symptoms.

So how do doctors catch the fakers?

A malingerer is like an beginning actor who’s overacting. A beginning actor may try to play a drunk person by slurring every word and swaying and falling down, but an experienced actor knows what a drunk is like, and plays the drunk as someone who is drunk, but is trying to act normal.

Many people who try to fake a mental illness try to “play crazy.”

A faker will try to make their illness front and center, and make their psychosis the first thing they want to discuss, while a real patient will be reluctant to explain their symptoms.

A faker will be hostile and act as if nobody believes him or her, which is rare in genuine psychotics.

A faker will act stupider than they should be, not realizing that intelligence will not diminish just because he or she is psychotic.

Fakers will be vague about details. Instead of saying that a voice was male or female, the faker might say “I don’t know.” Real psychotics would know the answer.

It’s also difficult to fake certain schizophrenic symptoms, such as getting off track while speaking, coining new words, finding associations between unrelated things, or speech which is so disorganized that at first it sounds correct but which actually makes no sense.

In acting, a beginning actor will keep trying to add things to a performance. To play the emotion “sad,” a bad actor will add heavy sighs and crying, while a good actor will subtract emotion, such as letting the character smile just a little, but making it a tight smile with no happiness showing around the eyes.

An inexperienced faker will do the same, by adding symptoms of “craziness,” forgetting that there are also many things that get subtracted from an individual with schizophrenia.