Can schizophrenia out grow in a person or do they need to be on medication?

Without treatment, schizophrenia will remain, or continue to get worse. Carpenter, McGlashan and Strauss (1977) did demonstrate that psychosocial treatments can be of benefit to schizophrenics, but only really when combined with pharmacological intervention. It must be remembered that schizophrenia is a disorder associated with neurological structures and neurotransmitters, meaning that the best approach is always going to ‘involve’ medication. Symptoms can be minor, but you cannot simply grow out of schizophrenia… Maybe one could if he / she lived in a utopian, ultra-supportive environment, but this isn’t the case.

3 things have been discovered so far about what happens in the brain of schizophrenic person.

1. 40-50% of patients show a slight change in the brain anatomy, mostly a reduction of the frontal lobe, Hippocampus and temporal lobes.
2. Dopamine levels have been shown to rise during psychotic breaks and are dopamine blockers have been shown to reduce the symptoms of psychosis in patients
3. A neuro transmitter called Glutamate and the low number of glutamate receptors have been shown to be in very low levels, and the cognitive problems were mimicked in ordinary people by giving them glutamate blockers like Ketamine and phencyclidine…. So as you can see the brain is altered to a state where it cannot revert back, and thus people suffering from schizophrenia will always suffer without medication :O

Bro, 1977? they didn’t really know what was going on in their brains back then :D

That was a foundational study for controlled psychosocial intervention in treating schizophrenia. And well picked, I gave them credit for that very reason :D.

Some researchers have also suggested that serotonin may play a role in schizophrenia, but - like you - I adhere to the dopamine hypothesis seeing as dopamine antagonistic dr*gs have been found to be more effective for the treatment of most cases of schizophrenia. The substantia nigra is another brain structure relevant to schizophrenia.

Oh i see now why you chose to mention that study. Well serotonin isn’t as important to control as the dopamine levels, seeing as they usually spike during a psychotic break, but since no one really knows whats going on you can’t say it doesn’t play a role yet :D

The serotonin hypothesis is an older one… I can’t remember much about it, but I do remember that they found SSRI’s and other such medications to be minimally effective. However, like you said, we still don’t have a clue what’s happening. We’ll probably hear that dopamine doesn’t even exist tomorrow, haha.

It does require medication. It doesn’t go away by itself.

Some schitzophrenic people can do the “double face” trick. They can pretend to function normally to strangers at first sight. And you need to get to know them to notice their issue. People with psychosis can be very smart.

They can even understand what society expects them to behave like. It just often appears to them that society is malevolent, keeping secrets from them, plotting against them, mind-controlled by aliens or otherwise “wrong” while they believe themselves to be the only normal person in the world.

This state of mind can lead to very dangerous situations. Psychotic people sometimes even endanger themselves or others, based on their delusions.

If you know someone with schizophrenia / psychosis, you should try to make them go to the doctor. This can be very difficult, because these people tend to believe that they are normal and the world is crazy. They see things and hear voices. Other people tell them these things are not there. They believe that their delusions are real. They often develop conspiracy theories that their delusions are secret messages or secret knowledge that they are not supposed to hear. They sometimes think that there is a threat and that other people maliciously ignore this threat or are part of it. They might even think that the doctors are the bad guys, trying to cu them off from the secret mesasages.

No one can really handle that alone. Psychotic people are hard to deal with. But they need help.

Thank you everyone :)