Schizoaffective Disorder Definition

hi im currantly waiting to be assed and i have all the symptons of both bipolar and schizophina , my nana and mum both got diagnosed with schizophina ( both got sectioned and missed diagnosed)is it possible thats what i have ? also how long does a diagnoses usally take? i am dessprate to stop all this now i already feel iv lost controll,

I read an interesting article this week about the link between schizophrenia and discrimination:

http://www.newint.org/features/web-excl ... imination/

Is this common knowledge?

Well the link between immigration and schizophrenia is well known. However the reason why is that in many cultures incestuous relations are common. Many genetic defects are common amongst certain cultures.

Obviously this totally nothing to do with racism because afaik causing genetic defects by namecalling is impossible.

Highly suggestive article tasking a fact and turning it into nonsense.

It's actually backed up with some quite sound research if you look at the links (even though it is just a theory at this stage). But schizophrenia is pretty much uniformly distributed worldwide so your assertion that other cultures have more schizophrenia and they do so because of 'incestuous relations' or 'genetic defects' is baseless.

suavey wrote:It's actually backed up with some quite sound research if you look at the links (even though it is just a theory at this stage). But schizophrenia is pretty much uniformly distributed worldwide so your assertion that other cultures have more schizophrenia and they do so because of 'incestuous relations' or 'genetic defects' is baseless.

Clearly you have an opinion. But opinions aren't worth much if not backed up by facts. The theory regardless it's 'sound' research is absurd. You don't get genetic defects from namecalling.

There are quite a few cultures were inbreeding is rampant. Leading to overrepresentation of genetic defects.

Genetic Disorders in Arab Populations: A 2006 Update
Until recently, infectious or environmental diseases and malnutrition-related disorders constituted the major cause of ill health and mortality in Arab populations. However, progress made in healthcare standards in many Arab countries decreased the impact of such disorders in favor of an increased understanding of the molecular basis of heredity, hence, the better recognition of genetically transmitted conditions as a major cause of morbidity and mortality
(Table 1.1).
Consanguinity
One of the most important factors contributing to the preponderance of genetic disorders in Arab populations is the deep-rooted norm of consanguineous marriages (Figure 1.1). While the rates of consanguineous marriages remain unchanged or have declined in several countries, these rates have increased since the last generation in Algeria (Zaoui and Biemont, 2002), the United Arab Emirates (Al-Gazali et al., 1997), and Yemen (Jurdi and Saxena, 2003). Recently, many studies from the region have drawn strong correlations between consanguinity and hearing loss (Bener et al., 2005), infanto-youthful death rate (Hammami et al., 2005b), respiratory allergies, eczema (Bener and Janahi, 2005), congenital heart defects (Yunis et al., 2006), mental retardation, epilepsy, diabetes (Bener and Hussain, 2006), and many others (reviewed in Tadmouri, 2004a; Tadmouri et al.,
2004).

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1828618/genetics-arabs.PDF

Many more studies can be found using a simple google search:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=10&q=genetic+defects+arab%20schizophrenia&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5

Political correctness never lead to reality, just to nonsensical theories such as the one you cited.

Re the difference:

Hopefully I am not infringing on some copyright, but there is a good explanation in the "It's Not Mental" book saying with bipolar with psychosis, if you stop the mood symptoms you stop the psychosis, but with schizoaffective, if you stop the mood symptoms you still have psychosis and vice versa.

Put simply the difference between schizoaffective and bipolar type 1 as my psychiatrist explained it to me is that in schizoaffective disorder there has to be at least one episode of delusions without the mood component being present over a month. There are also a number of other diagnostic criteria. In schizophrenia there isn't a mood component and there are positive and negative symptoms. The negative symptoms are not psychosis but things like loss of pleasure senations and lack of motivation. The positive symptoms are the delusions and hallucinations and so on. The prognosis for schizoaffective disorder is better than that for schizophrenia. With bipolar type 1 there can be the psychotic symptoms like delusions and hallucinations during a high and also depressive lows but not occuring simulataneously. There are good articles on schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia on wikipedia.

Suavey, this is a very good article on an interesting phenomena which postulates a number of arguments without jumping to any unreasonable conclusions. It could be that by persuing this line of inquiry that some light may be shone on the underlying causes of schizophrenia and it is an interesting study.
Petrossa, as for the idea that incest causes schizophrenia I think what you are refering to are called recessive genes. I'm no expert on genetics but I think this is the tendency that a defect may be repeated more frequently if present on both sides of the family tree. However this New Internationalist article points out no link has been found to point to an increased incidence in schizophrenia in any one race. Rather the article points to immigrants either first or subsequent generations being more at risk of schizophrenia. There is also evidence that people in urban rather than rural environments are more prone to schizophrenia. The other point of interest to note from the comments on the article is that people from less industrialised countries who are diagnosed with schizophrenia are after some recovery more likely to return to their previous place in society than those in Western or more developed countries. I have heard this point made before and it is very interesting. That means people who are not being subjected to a massive cocktails of psychotropic drugs are fairing better than those of us in the Western world with our supposedly sophisticated healthcare system.

ive been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder (depressive type) and im finding it really hard can anyone help me ?

Proposed revisions for the DSM-V on schizoaffective disorder. There are different tabs on the page with the DSM-IV criterion and a little bit of background information and explanation. Simple and sweet.

I do believe this is currently in the trial period and then they will do final revisions before it's release. So it may change again or stay the way it is in the link provided above. Will probably be changed in the volume after this one too. They always try to improve, add, and remove.