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Schizoaffective Disorder
What is Schizoaffective Disorder?
Schizoaffective disorder is a psychiatric diagnosis that includes a wide array of symptoms from a wide variety of different areas. Like other diagnoses, it severely affects and individual’s ability to take care of themselves and attend to tasks. In order to have a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, an individual must have symptoms of schizophrenia and a mood disorder. While these symptoms won’t always occur at the exact same time, a person with schizoaffective disorder will experience these symptoms at the same time, and sometimes apart. Schizoaffective disorder affects about 1 in every 200 individuals, and is found only slightly more in women than men. Like other disorders, it is found all over the world, and with all different sorts of people.
What is the course of Schizoaffective Disorder?
Schizoaffective disorder begins with most people in their early 20s into their early 30s. While it is uncommon to develop Schizoaffective Disorder later than that, it does happen. Schizoaffective disorder is cyclical in nature, in that there are periods of time where symptoms are worse and periods where symptoms are better. To further make things confusing, sometimes psychotic symptoms are present when the mood symptoms are not, and vice versa. An important tool in treating Schizoaffective disorder is to diligently track the experience of symptoms so that patterns can be recognized and understood.
Managing Schizoaffective Disorder
Schizoaffective disorder has symptoms from both mood disorders and schizophrenia, and so the ways to manage symptoms include strategies and skills that help manage those conditions. Things that help manage schizoaffective disorder include:
Gaining awareness and understanding of symptoms
Develop safety, crisis, and relapse prevention plans
Develop daily structure
Practice coping skills
Learn how to manage and reduce stress
Build social support
Use medication effectively
Ask for help when needed
Questions: Before reading this section, what did you know about Schizoaffective Disorder? What do you think might be beneficial in better understanding it?
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