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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Definitions and symptoms, and an overview of causes and relations with religion
What is schizophrenia? How might it be affected by religious and cultural factors such as the value placed on visions in some religions?
Ann is 26, a trained commercial artist, and married to Henry with whom she had been going out since she was 18. Both found their marriage boring. Ann began going out dancing and met another man. As a Catholic, Ann could not consider divorce. But one evening she announced that she was going to marry the other man, go with him to South America and have twenty babies. She spoke very rapidly and much of what she said was unintelligible. She also said that she was seeing visions of the Virgin Mary, and in the office tried to get her colleagues all to kneel and say the rosary. When she was taken to see a priest, she spat at him. A psychiatrist recommended hospitalisation.
(based on a case description in Comer, 1999)Schizophrenia is a generic name for a group of conditions which come under the general heading of psychosis or madness. There is a serious deterioration of functioning, strange beliefs or experiences, inappropriate emotional states, and sometimes motor disturbances.
Emil Kraepelin (1896) distinguished two forms of insanity: dementia praecox and manic-depressive psychosis. He thought that sufferers from dementia praecox would gradually deteriorate, while people with manic depression would have periods of remission between psychotic episodes.
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