Discuss one or more biological explanation of schizophrenia and assess the extent to which research has supported your chosen explanation.
Schizophrenia is often referred to as a "brain disease" largely due to the weight of evidence suggesting that it has a strong biological basis. Schizophrenia affects somewhere between one and one and a half percent of the population. Schizophrenia has a close link to manic depression and the two can be hard to distinguish between. Characteristics common among schizophrenics can be positive or negative, positive characteristics include: delusions, hallucinations, disorganised speech, and grossly disorganised or catatonic behaviour. Negative characteristics include: lack of emotion and motivation and loss of language abilities. Two or more of the characteristics have to be present and have to have been continuous for at least six months, the patient must also have problems functioning in society. There are five different types of schizophrenia, these include: catatonic Schizophrenia, Disorganised schizophrenia, Paranoid schizophrenia, Undifferentiated schizophrenia and Residual schizophrenia. There is no known cure for the disease but the majority of schizophrenia suffers respond well to drug treatment and are able to live independently.
The biological explanation of schizophrenia consists of four causes, these include: genes, biochemistry, neuroanatomy, and finally viruses.
Most of the research done into the explanation of genes causing schizophrenia comes from twin studies, family studies and adoption studies that examine concordance rates. Gottesman (1991) found that the whole population has a 1% chance of getting schizophrenia. However, if one parent has schizophrenia this percentage rises to 16%. If both parents have schizophrenia then this rises 46%. He also did much research into the concordance rates of twins getting schizophrenia. He found that the concordance rates for identical (MZ) twins are 48%.
