2023-08-27 02:35:13
MARTINA CONTI
Madrid
Updated Sunday, August 27, 2023 – 02:35
One day he came home and had a very strange look. He opened his eyes, like that, as if something was wrong with him, and he asked me if I had called him and I said no. It was there that he confessed to me that Hey you. The next day we went to the doctor and they sent us to the psychiatrist. They said they had to admit him for a week, they gave him a medication, but it had no effect. This is how Bárbara (the name is assumed because she wants to remain anonymous) begins to tell how she discovered that her 16-year-old son, 24 today, suffered schizophrenia mental disorder.
He answered me, he was more aggressive and we had arguments every now and then, he remembers. In addition, he began to tell me how the television spoke to him or someone communicated with him and I had to leave the house because I had an appointment in the mountains with I don’t know who. He left and went alone. And then, little by little, he began to claim that he had a gift, that he could hear voices and talk to people, sort of telepathically.
Your child suffers from one of the most difficult mental disorders to categorize and detect: childhood and adolescent schizophrenia. In a 15% Of the cases of people with schizophrenia, the first psychotic episode occurs below 18 years. When the disorder begins in childhood and adolescence, they tend to respond worse to pharmacological and psychological treatment, explains celso arangodirector of the Mental Health Institute of the Gregorio Maran Hospital and a psychiatrist specializing in the child and adolescent area.
In Spain, the prevalence of schizophrenia is 0,7 %which means that almost 350.000 personas they suffer it; with one new case per year for every 10,000.
Grace Rodriguez, head of the Avifes Psychological Care Service (Vizcana Association of Relatives and People with Mental Illness), affirms that there is no single cause and lists risk factors: On the one hand, there are those that have to do with biology and biochemistry. Our brain works by electrical impulses, by receptors, there is a cerebral biochemistry, we do not know how it works. That is it is not known if someone at the biochemical level has a risk factor, greater vulnerability. On the other hand, there is genetics and even heredity, that some of the relatives have had a mental health problem. Then, the environmental factors, which have to do with the family and the social environment, such as bullying, sexual abuse, little affective bond, all traumatic situations, stress and also the consumption of toxicsexplains the expert.
An element that coincides in many cases of minors with schizophrenia is having suffered bullying. Graciela Rodríguez affirms that the 98% of the young people with mental health problems who attend the association have suffered some type of bullying, to varying degrees from rejection to aggression.
School bullying was one of the events that has most affected Sofa, 14 years old, and that aroused, according to his mother Bienvenida, a strong social phobia. Her classmates made fun of her for her musical tastes and in particular for listening to the Japanese group BTS. He has never quite gotten over this difficult time and often goes into a loopHe becomes alienated from reality and even visualizes himself on a plane traveling to Japan, where, as he usually says, he can be happy, he emphasizes.
Her daughter suffers from schizophrenia, although Bienvenida prefers to talk about psychosis. Psychosis encompasses a group of symptoms that can occur because of schizophrenia or for other reasons. The beginning of Sofa’s illness, her mother places it at the age of 12, during confinement due to the pandemic: He had a real explosion. I consider it the starting point of his discomfort because the routine was broken, it states. However, Sofia’s problems began much earlier when she, at just nine years old, manifested suicidal and self-harm thoughts for the first time. Her behavior worsened until she repeated her admission to a hospital four times, the last time in March.
Something similar also happened to the sister of Pablo, 25-year-old psychologist. The young woman was born with a genetic syndrome, 22q11.2, which causes intellectual disability, language, learning and even relationship problems with her peers. She suffered bullying and it was a situation that overwhelmed her a lot. she was only 17 years old and she remembers these moments as one of the most difficult of her life. My sister started not wanting to go to school, he cried a lot. At first she didn’t speak anything, she didn’t want to relate to us either, she had a lot of anger inside her and she was diagnosed with depression. A short time later she began to tell us that they were spying on her from the mobile, that there were cameras at home, that they were following her and I also remember something that was that she would start laughing a lot out of nowhere like a very strange laugh. It was there that the psychiatrist diagnosed him with schizophrenia, explains Pablo.
Relational difficulties are among the possible alarm symptoms that can warn of the development of a psychotic disorder. As explained by Jordi Artigue, clinical psychologist and president of the Spanish Association of Neuropsychiatry: In a young person or in a child, social isolation is very important.In other words, people who begin to have symptoms of psychosis have difficulties establishing social relationships, because they feel very insecure and think that others can criticize them or say strange things to them. Another important element is that These people usually have strange sensations, sometimes they hear voices, noises, sensations through the body, as if they had, for example, an animal that runs through their body.. In addition, they can have very restrictive or strange interests, for example, being only interested in a certain type of animal or insect and wanting to know everything about that type of insect and not share it, said Artigue.
Lourdes Is the mother of Reuben, a 15-year-old teenager. The first diagnosis of his son was of child psychosis. Like Bienvenida, she prefers not to use the word schizophrenia: She has a mental disorder, it has not become schizophrenia because we have detected it from a very young age, she says.
As can be seen, most families prefer to talk about psychosis and do not use the term schizophrenia, a position that is also shared by some professionals, including Jordi Artigue: I have worked for years in a psychosis risk detection team and technically we prefer the name psychosis because it would encompass both schizophrenia and other similar disorders. In any case, with people we prefer not to talk about schizophrenia or psychosis, he explains.
Lourdes was a social worker and this, she explains, helped her detect early warning signs. The child manifested irrational fears from a very young age, such as not wanting to go to the toilet alone or continuous crying without anyone or anything being able to calm him down. He also had no perception of risk. He saw a precipice and he jumped, he was very audacious and did not understand the dangersays the mother.
In addition, Rubén often used nonsense phrases, something that probably represented a first indication of the disease but that Lourdes could hardly guess. He was small and although he said absurd phrases, this did not alarm me because I thought it was normal.
Experts like Artigue stress the importance of early detection: It is important because this way we prevent psychotic episodes and a deterioration of brain function. With proper treatment that combines therapy, psychotherapy, family treatment, even group treatment, and psychopharmaceuticals, a person can recover, even if it is a rather slow recovery, he says.
25% of schizophrenia cases will make a full recovery. This means that of the remaining 75%, half will have residual symptoms with difficulties that may improve in adulthood and the other 50% will have a fairly negative prognosis that affects their daily life, Arango details.
The truth is that none of the protagonists of this report, neither Rubn, nor Sofia, nor Bárbara’s son have a life similar to that of their peers of the same age. Parents, in particular, complain about the lack of school resources for cases like those of their children. There is still a lot of social stigma and a lot of fear of mental illness.
Fear is irrational, but it feeds on ignorance, false knowledge and fantasy.. The pain of receiving your child’s diagnosis with leukemia is very deep, but you receive very strong social support that helps sustain you emotionally. You do not have this social support when you are diagnosed with a serious mental illness such as schizophrenia, since it carries a label associated with fear that people tend to avoid your contact as a defense mechanism. It is a disease that the family carries in solitude since talking about it seems to close the doors to possibilities, emphasizes the doctor Pilar De Castrospecialist in Psychiatry at the University of Navarra Clinic.
Thanks to the help of an association, Salud Mental Molina y Comarca, Rubn’s family tries to help their son achieve greater independence: Before we were afraid to give him an order, he used to explode, hit his head and yell. There came a time when he no longer had any limits. Now, on the other hand, she can carry out her first tasks: shower, make the bed and be more responsible, says Lourdes about the improvement she has had in the family environment.
Now what worries them most is what will become of him tomorrow. Our wish is that you can be independent and happy.
#Living #slab #schizophrenia #age