Schizophrenia

Every mental and behavioral challenge can cause intense symptoms affecting your daily life, but none pose the severe difficulties faced by people with schizophrenia. NYC Psychiatric Associates, located in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, provides exceptional psychiatric care for schizophrenia. Their psychiatrists offer medication management, therapy, and ongoing support designed to prevent psychosis and give you the ability to navigate a healthy life. Whether you just had your first psychotic episode or you have a long history of schizophrenia challenges, call the office today or use online booking to request an appointment.

What is schizophrenia?

Schizophrenia affects the way you think and understand the world. Psychosis, the primary symptom of schizophrenia, makes you lose touch with reality, preventing you from functioning in your daily life and making it hard or impossible to interact with others.

What psychotic symptoms occur in people with schizophrenia?

Psychotic episodes cause several symptoms, including:

Delusions

Delusions cause you to believe something that’s not real. For example, you may believe that someone is controlling your mind or you’re famous.

Hallucinations

When you hallucinate, you perceive something that doesn’t exist. The most common hallucination is hearing voices, but you could feel, taste, or smell something that isn’t real.

Disorganized thoughts and speech

Psychosis causes illogical, racing, disjointed, and chaotic thoughts. Your speech reflects the state of your thoughts. As a result, you may mix up words, stop talking in midsentence, say things that don’t make sense, or jump from one topic to another.

Disorganized behaviors

Disorganized behavior refers to bizarre, senseless, repetitive, and possibly dangerous activities. For example, you may walk in circles or become aggressive. You could also stop moving or speaking (catatonia).

Does schizophrenia cause other symptoms?

Schizophrenia also causes symptoms, called negative symptoms, that are different from psychosis. A few examples include:

• Isolating yourself from others
• Lacking emotions
• Being unable to enjoy activities
• Neglecting personal hygiene

Negative symptoms generally refer to losing any typical or expected emotions and behaviors.

How is schizophrenia treated?

The psychiatric specialists offer diagnostic evaluations in-office and through an online telemedicine platform to assess symptoms and confirm a schizophrenia diagnosis. 

After completing a psychiatric evaluation and determining you have schizophrenia, your NYC Psychiatric Associates provider prescribes antipsychotic medications. 

Medication management is an essential schizophrenia treatment because it reduces future psychotic episodes and may stop them from recurring.

Your provider may also recommend psychotherapy (talk therapy), a mental health treatment with many benefits for people with schizophrenia. Your therapist may teach you to recognize signs of an impending psychotic episode and ways to prevent it from occurring.

You will also learn skills that support your life during therapy, whether you need to manage anger, learn to build relationships, stay employed, or need to overcome a sleep disorder like insomnia (a common problem that can trigger a psychotic episode).

Your provider also connects you with community resources that can help you find work, housing, and other essential services.

Early treatment for schizophrenia often leads to better long-term results. Call NYC Psychiatric Associates today or use online booking to request an initial consultation.