Word: schizophrenia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...good candidate for something called dysthymic disorder.) Though it's fashionable these days to think of psychiatry as just another arm of medicine, there is no biological test for any of these disorders. While imaging techniques have shown abnormalities in the brain of some people with schizophrenia, no scan can diagnose even that severe condition, let alone something opaque like "histrionic personality disorder." (For which the DSM lists the following as a sign: "consistently uses physical appearance to draw attention to self." So I'm sick if I exchange my Aunt Thelma's drab sweaters for flashier ones every Christmas...
...capture the size and shape of brain structures; others freeze-frame the ever shifting activity of nerve cells as they fire and subside. With this information, doctors are beginning to understand--at the level of the neuron--how mental illnesses occur. "Brain imaging," says Dr. Nancy Andreasen, a leading schizophrenia researcher at the University of Iowa and the MIND Institute in Albuquerque, N.M., "has changed the face of psychiatry...
...Schizophrenia is where much of the pioneering work in this field has occurred, and the images on the following pages trace the remarkable journey that scientists are taking as they search for the roots of this disorder and perhaps someday a cure...
...scanning ring, these "slices" can be combined to create the illusion of depth. The resulting pictures of bone and soft tissue can help doctors distinguish between patients with a psychiatric disorder and those with head trauma (which can trigger similar symptoms). CTs have been particularly useful in identifying schizophrenia patients. In the 1970s researchers uncovered the first distinguishing abnormality in these patients' brains: the ventricles (fluid-filled open spaces), circled in yellow, are significantly larger in those with the disease, left, than in normal subjects, far left. This provided the first clue that schizophrenics may have less brain tissue affecting...
...Schizophrenia is the most personally destructive and least understood of all the major mental illnesses. Its principal hallmark is extremely disordered thinking--the kind that robs many of its victims of the ability to keep a job, maintain a relationship or even hold a coherent conversation. The first serious symptoms typically begin sometime after puberty, in the late teens or 20s. Some but not all schizophrenics suffer hallucinations. Some but not all schizophrenics hear voices. The cause is undeniably physical--perhaps the unhappy combination of a genetic predisposition and an infection suffered in the womb. In any event...