Causes and Consequences of Schizophrenia and Dissociative Identity Disorder

According to MedlinePlus“Psychotic disorders are severe mental disorders that cause abnormal thinking and perceptions. People with psychoses lose touch with reality. Two of the main symptoms are delusions and hallucinations.” (Psychotic Disorders) Schizophrenia and Dissociative Identity Disorder are both psychotic disorders that are caused by many different things and if not controlled can lead to very bad consequences.

Schizophrenia Causes
Schizo means split, and phrenia means mind. When joining them, schizophrenia means a fragmented pattern of thinking. Schizophrenia’s causes are still unknown, but it can sometimes be caused by genetics, like in Jani and Bodhi's case; a seven year old girl and a five year old boy siblings were both diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of five. Also your risk increases if you have unregulated dopamine levels, and  also another possible cause of schizophrenia is the environment you live in, meaning doing drugs like marijuana, ecstasy and others can also be a trigger to this mental disorder.  Schizophrenia is triggered in men around their early twenties and for women around their late twenties the difference is, it acts more severe on men than for women. It is a spectrum disorder; “incongruent, disturbed perceptions; losing contact with reality” said Kathleen Yale. (Crashcourse. "Schizophrenia & Dissociative Disorders: Crash Course Psychology.)

Schizophrenia Consequences
If not correctly controlled and treated, schizophrenia can lead to many dangerous consequences. It can make you have delusions of control; meaning that the person thinks that some outside force is controlling their actions, and also delusions of reference, meaning that everyone is speaking towards them, for example, if a news caster says “watch out for rain tonight” the person with schizophrenia may thinks that they are sending him/her a message (Schizophrenia - causes, symptoms, diagnosis, treatment & pathology). Another consequence schizophrenia has is that it makes you have hallucinations not only visually but auditory as well. To enrich my investigation about schizophrenia, I spent a whole two hour class with headphones hearing a video recorded based on what patients with schizophrenia said they heard; at the beginning I thought that eventually I would block all the voices, but it turned out to made me completely anxious and could not let me concentrate. This makes me think about all the people who have schizophrenia and have to work or just simply have to go on with a day hearing voices in your head, sometimes the voices even giving you commands and making you paranoid. Auditory hallucinations are not always bad, for example Jani, a seven year old girl who was diagnosed with schizophrenia said that one of the voices was named “seven” and was her friend. But for her brother Bodhi, the voice he heard made him go into uncontrollable acts of rage and sometimes even he would bite his shoulders or scratch his arms. (Born Schizophrenic)

Dissociative Identity Disorder Causes
Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.) or Multiple Identity Disorder is a disorder that makes your mind create different personalities, they can go from a gay man to a housewife with two kids, to a baby boy. Your mind creates this as a defense mechanism. For example, if you are in an abusive relationship your mind can create another personality strong and with more confidence to help you stand up to your partner. D.I.D. is caused by an emotional abuse but also WebMD said that “research indicates that it is likely a psychological response to interpersonal and environmental stresses, particularly during early childhood years when emotional neglect or abuse may interfere with personality development. As many as 99% of individuals who develop dissociative disorders have recognized personal histories of recurring, overpowering, and often life-threatening disturbances at a sensitive developmental stage of childhood (usually before age 9).” (WebMD article).

Dissociative Identity Disorder Consequences
Some consequences that D.I.D. has is that they can cause you to have amnesia or parts of your memory erased. When switching between personalities one personality might not remember what happened in a lapse of time when the other personality was active. The personalities can have different voices, strengths, sicknesses and even some can acknowledge that they are one of many personalities but others don’t. This is very common in D.I.D. patients. This disorder can also greatly affect that people that surround you, for example, this family the daughter was removed from her mother several times by social service because the mother had D.I.D. Delusions can also create instability in a relationship that a person with D.I.D. has. (OWN)

To conclude, schizophrenia is a fragmented pattern of thinking that can cause delusions and hallucinations, and dissociative identity disorder is a defence mechanism that makes your brain create many different personalities that each one can have many different characteristics.