ALL THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT SCHIZOPHRENIA!

Schizophrenia is a chronic and severe mental disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. People with schizophrenia may seem like they have lost touch with reality. Although schizophrenia is not as common as other mental disorders, the symptoms can be very disabling.

In order to understand how people around us currently view schizophrenia, we decided to conduct a Google survey. The age of those who gave the survey ranged from 16 year olds to 50 year olds, and we collected around 20 responses, for now. The results of the survey, although not surprising, made us truly aware of the extent of the lack of awareness that surrounds schizophrenia.

As seen in the results below, more than 50% percent of respondents believe that those suffering from schizophrenia have multiple personalities- however this is not true. Schizophrenia actually refers to problems with hallucinations, not multiple personalities. The disorder linked with multiple personalities is known as split personality disorder. Another misconception as seen in the results, is whether or not there is a cure for those with schizophrenia- although it can be treated successfully and managed, there is no cure for schizophrenia. And lastly, we can see that in the final question, where respondents were asked to estimate how much of the total population percentage wise are affected by schizophrenia ranged from 6% to an astonishing 50%. However, the correct answer to this question is that around 1% of the total population is affected by schizophrenia- i.e 21 million individuals combat this mental illness everyday, so the least we can do is learn more about the disorder that affects them. Below are the tabulated results:

MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS: A PROJECT

Hello everyone! Welcome to our mental health campaign #mentalhealthmatters. Created by us, Jhanvi Natarajan and Khushi Bhargava of class 12 and 11 respectively, we were compelled to start this website after our Psychology Internship Program at Fortis Hospital. Here, we were able to learn so much about different mental disorders, their symptoms, psychiatric evaluations, etc – a lot of which was new information to us! We then started focusing on one particular mental disorder that is highly stigmatized and whose true nature was largely unknown- schizophrenia. Thus, we decided to make this website to spread awareness about this mental illness, and make all those around us understand that those with schizophrenia are not ‘crazy’, ‘mad’ or ‘psychotic’ but are humans and should be treated in a humane way. This blog is our way of telling you that mental health and disorders are just as important as physical ailments.

The main purpose of the blog is to clear the misconceptions people have about certain disorders or mental health in general. We started our research by spreading a survey we made about the mental disorder, schizophrenia. And to our surprise, we realized the true extent of how unaware the people around us are of this mental disorder (we shall be publishing the results and our thoughts on them soon in another blog post!), which prompted us to make this website as quickly as possible. Along with posts as such, we will hopefully be sharing new, interesting content as well, including interviews with clinical psychologists on the matter, important factual information on schizophrenia, etc- it’s high time we learn about the disorder that affects more than 21 million of the population worldwide.

Please do keep reading and subscribe and share this blog with everyone, because we are trying to do our bit to reach out to as many people as possible and spread awareness on the various mental disorders that exist and what they actually mean and stand for, starting with schizophrenia. 

Stay tuned for more,
Jhanvi and Khushi 
#mentalhealthmatters