The Myths about Schizophrenia – Yolanda, Grade 8

The Myths about Schizophrenia – Yolanda, Grade 8

This essay is written by one of my grade 8 students. The essay presents well-researched reasons as to why schizophrenia patients should not be stigmatized. The writer starts with a vivid description of an incident to draw the readers’ attention and then goes on to present her thesis, which clearly states how such patients should be treated in society. The writer uses excellent transitions to link the body paragraphs together and balances her argument by applying some persuasive elements in paragraph three. Finally, she sums up her arguments and makes another reference to the incident in the conclusion.  

The Myths about Schizophrenia

Would anyone ever want to be beheaded by a random stranger they happen to pass by?  Everyone would want to live their lives to their full potential and die of old age. Unfortunately, this was not the case for a 22-year-old passenger on a Greyhound bus in Manitoba. In July 2008, Tim McLean was beheaded by a schizophrenic, Vince Li, who was found not guilty due to his mental condition and was later released. However, Tim’s mother and some politicians have protested against the release of Li because they think that it is an unfair verdict as they are convinced that Vince Li is a murderer and should be locked away from society. However, the 280,000 schizophrenics in Canada, including Vince Li, are not criminals; therefore, they must be cured for their disease, and the treatment, in whatever form prescribed, must continue until the person is no longer considered a threat to society.

First of all, people with schizophrenia do not have malevolent intents; they are human beings affected by some illness. Studies have shown that schizophrenia is a disorder, which causes the schizophrenic to experience hallucinations, paranoia, breakdowns, and disorganized speech or behavior. A certain type of schizophrenia named paranoid schizophrenia could explain why a schizophrenic could be driven to commit unrestrained actions. This type of schizophrenia can cause delusions from logical themes such as religious, magnificent, or persecutory delusions, causing the individual to try to accomplish bizarre and odd goals. Moreover, the schizophrenic will develop anxious, frightened, angry, and argumentative behaviour, which can lead to violence towards self and/or others. There are many paranoia symptoms that will occur when a specific individual is experiencing positive or negative symptoms such as auditory hallucinations where multiple voices or a single voice will speak to the schizophrenic in an unfriendly tone, causing the individual to feel threatened, afraid, depressed, or frustrated. This will cause the individual to yell or talk back to the voices, fully unaware of their surroundings. Since they act this way, people who witness them will react as if they passed by a lunatic and will scurry away, thinking the “crazy person” will attack them. But they do not understand, such patients cannot control themselves. Occasionally, they may become aggressive when the voices will not stop, which makes them uncontrollable, driving them to commit inappropriate actions, such as theft. But such reactions can get violent when the individuals have suffered intense paranoia and delusions, causing them to envisage someone who is trying to poison, harm, or spy on them. Such patients will then think violence is their only self-defence, which they will lash out if they think that they are in danger. Now, unlike a schizophrenic, criminals plan in advance how they will be committing a crime. Therefore, criminals are dissimilar to a person with schizophrenia. Do not be mistaken as a schizophrenic is not vicious. If they notice the symptoms and seek treatment as soon as possible, they can recover from the condition.

Therefore, people with schizophrenia must receive the appropriate treatment, including the medications, the therapy, and the support. Each condition is different, so there must be a suitable kind of treatment for every single individual, depending on the severity of their disorder. Treatment comes in many ways. Some treatments only involve medication, known as the atypical antipsychotics, where the individual takes dopamine receptors by being flooded with high amounts of dopamine, which helps stop the hallucinations from happening. Other schizophrenics may have to stay in a hospital for periods of time with medical supervision in order to overcome symptoms or any unnatural behaviour.  They may also need psychotherapy, where a schizophrenic will need to see a psychiatrist who gives them proper treatment and guides them through the troubles that they are going through. They will also help a schizophrenic choose a suitable type of therapy needed to treat a particular illness. Still, others may go through vocational skills training, where the schizophrenic learns to contribute to the community as well as getting a stable job and lifestyle. All of these therapies are the best ways to treat a schizophrenic. Schizophrenics are patients, who need treatment in order to recover from their condition, which is curable in most cases.

However, in some rare cases, in spite of all the medications and the therapy, patients with schizophrenia cannot recover from their condition and remain a big threat not only to other citizens but also to themselves. In this case, patients may have to be sent to a long-term care facility until a treatment or a drug is developed. Such patients are also a danger to the safety of their other family members. In many cases, the parents of such patients have urged the government to hospitalize their schizophrenic child in order to keep their other children safe. In one instance, a worried mother of two children called CBC, beseeching the authorities to “take her son away and lock him up!” The mother has a daughter and a son who has schizophrenia and the mother worries that the son would harm not only his sister but also her! Some authorities may question the request and decline to send the son to some long-term care facility, but what they do not understand is that the child could hurt himself too, and therefore, he needs to be under supervision to prevent any inappropriate actions like suicide. Such patients are in a depressed state, and so they are very likely to kill themselves. Parents of such patients would like them to survive the suicidal thoughts so that they can have the chance to undergo some new and promising therapies in the future. The thought of a new drug having been developed to cure such severe disorder in the future when the schizophrenic has already taken his or her life is the most distressing thought for the families of such patients.

To conclude, people with schizophrenia must not be stigmatized as they are patients that need the appropriate treatment in order to recover from their condition. Everyone must understand that people with this type of mental illness are no different than us. We can not criticize them and see them as monsters. Patients, such as Vince Li, require treatment and support rather than judgment and stigmatizing. In fact, had Vince been given the treatment he needed, he might not have killed Tim McLean in the first place.