According to The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (8th Edition), schizophrenia is defined as “a long-term mental disorder that involves a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behaviour, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation.” (Oxford 947) It may also involve hallucinations, bizarre behaviour, disorganized speech and strange feelings like the patients believing that people are targeting to harm them.
Schizophrenia affects both men and women. The disorder is usually diagnosed during the early adulthood age of between 17 years and 25 years. The signs of schizophrenia usually present themselves much earlier in men as opposed to women. Also, more men than women suffer from the disease worldwide. One of the reasons given for this is that male children are generally at a higher risk of getting brain injury before being born than female children. Also, by virtue of their masculine and aggressive nature, men and boys are more likely to get injuries to their head or brain, say, from sports and fight, than women and girls.
It is estimated that at least 1% of the world population suffer from this mental disorder. At any given time, 2 million or a slightly higher number of Americans suffer from schizophrenia.
Dr. Michael Phillips and his research colleagues found a close link between schizophrenia and suicide in the People’s Republic of China. They defined suicide as “a deliberate self-injury resulting in death.” Also, unlike the other parts of the world, schizophrenia was found to be more prevalent among Chinese women than Chinese men.
- But why are there more female patients than male patients of schizophrenia
People’s Republic of China while the opposite is the case worldwide? Although this trend of prevalence remains largely mysterious, the most plausible explanation is that the mortality rate of male patients of the disorder in the People’s Republic of China is higher than that of their female counterparts.
While the researchers did not consider social drift as a major reason for more women than men being schizophrenic in China, it forms part of the possible explanation. Schizophrenia is a condition more prevalent among urban than rural population. In search of a better life, many Chinese women who are schizophrenic move to urban centres, get married and settle there. Since medical attention is better and more accessible in the urban areas, the women’s chance of survival increases tremendously, thus their high number.
- Subjective Well Being (SWB) is “a broad category of phenomena that includes people’s emotional responses, domain satisfactions, and global judgements of life satisfaction.” (Diener et al, 277). Countries which rank high on subjective well-being experience higher rates of suicide than those nations with considerably lower subjective well-being. The question is why is this the case?
Countries with similar socio-cultural practices have similar rates and distribution of suicide cases. Generally, cultural aspects like age come into play. In most countries, the elderly people are more likely to commit suicide than the young ones because their societies find them to be burdens. The elderly also feel that they have lived their full lives and don’t want to be a bother to anyone. Also, psychiatric illnesses like schizophrenia contribute to higher suicide cases due to the stigma associated with them.
