Schizophrenia is a psychotic illness that is accompanied by a disorder of thought processes and disturbances in emotional response. One of the varieties of this mental disorder is sluggish schizophrenia. Its distinguishing feature is a slow flow and a blurred symptomatic picture. Treatment of sluggish schizophrenia is a long and painstaking process.

Symptoms of sluggish schizophrenia

– The patient has disturbances in mental activity, spheres of perception, signs of paranoia appear.
– Manifestations of this disease are hysterical seizures, accompanied by sobs and often self-inflicted bodily harm. Personality disorders are also observed: a manic desire for universal admiration, emphasized defiant behavior, unreasonable mood swings; physiological changes – unsteady gait, tremor of the limbs during excitement. – Often, patients have an obsession with their incurable illness or impending death.

Sluggish schizophrenia signs: in addition to the above symptoms, this disease can manifest itself in others. For example, patients may show a too pronounced desire for solitude, suffer from various phobias, experience unreasonable anxiety, and get tired too quickly.

How does sluggish schizophrenia manifest itself?

Sluggish schizophrenia is called schizotypal disorder, thereby delimiting it from other types of schizophrenia. This is not entirely natural: schizophrenia remains schizophrenia no matter how quickly it develops.

In sluggish schizophrenia, the symptoms are usually similar to manifestations of neurosis: “obsessions” appear, a tendency to perform various rituals (already existing or invented by the patient himself). Excessive “philosophizing” and abstract reflections that have no value are very characteristic of her.

This disease is rarely diagnosed. This is not surprising: ritualism or “compulsion” is rarely associated with such serious mental disorders.

Perceptual disturbances

With this pathology, patients may feel unmotivated fears that seem absurd to a healthy person. For example, patients may experience an overwhelming fear of a particular color or shape. A person dressed in an orange sweater with square patterns can cause fear in the patient and a desire to run away, hide from the whole world.

Over time, the patient ceases to feel these fears as something painful and wrong: such sensations become the “norm” for him. Sometimes sluggish schizophrenia causes obsessive desires, and their character, as a rule, is very peculiar. A person suffering from such a disease can spit in the face of a passer-by and throw a stone at him if his obsessive desire so requires. Hundreds of such examples could be cited.

All this is very draining and tiring. Patients complain of impotence, constant fatigue and insomnia . The range of interests narrows: patients stop paying attention to what is happening around, focusing their attention on one thing (often on their own state).

Later, senestopathies may appear . These peculiar perceptual disturbances can hardly be called hallucinations, although there are many similarities between them. The patient may complain that his body is completely filled with water or pus, and the brain has turned into a huge rotating spiral. At the same time, a person who is ill with sluggish schizophrenia will be completely and completely sure that he is telling the truth.

Loss of your own “I”

Depersonalization is a state in which a person ceases to feel like a separate person who has his own thinking and his own will. Often such disorders occur in patients with indolent schizophrenia, especially if the disease lasts a long time and the patient does not receive any treatment.

A person ceases to feel his thoughts, emotions and aspirations personally as his own – it seems to him that someone from outside controls his psyche. At the same time, everything that the patient does, he calls “automatic”, while emphasizing the deficit of his own personality.

Dysmorphophobia

Dysmorphophobia , which is almost always accompanied by dysmorphomania , is a person’s desire to “seek out” and eliminate his physical shortcomings.

Patients with sluggish schizophrenia often suffer from anorexia, trying to achieve an ideal appearance for their perception. Sometimes this disorder is very pronounced and makes life difficult for a person.

Hysterical reactions

Often, sluggish schizophrenia is accompanied by hysteria. Hysteria is an extremely complex disorder that can take thousands of forms and variants. The only thing that unites all hysterical diseases is the desire of the patient to be in the center of everyone’s attention. If such a patient does not find sympathy and support, all hysterical disorders disappear without a trace.

This often misleads doctors of other specialties: hysteria in sluggish schizophrenia can cause the patient to unconsciously simulate a wide variety of diseases.

Treatment of sluggish schizophrenia

Treatment of a patient with a similar disease is primarily prescribed medication. While taking medication, you must strictly adhere to the doctor’s prescriptions, since the effectiveness of treatment depends on this. Treatment of indolent schizophrenia is not limited to medications. Such a patient needs psychological support from a specialist (trainings, professional rehabilitation) and close people.