The symptoms characterizing this disorder are manifold. These are the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. In addition, their ability to mentally attend, remember, and engage in abstract thinking diminishes over time, so they cannot negotiate the problems of daily living and continue to develop in their vocation. They experience disturbances of mood, leading many to attempt and succeed in committing suicide. All of these symptoms have the capacity to disable performance, and the functional disability is perhaps one of the most devastating aspects of the illness.
Treatments do work.
As stated earlier, if patients are treated promptly and effectively, the vast majority will respond and even go into remission. Studying remission rates, we have learned that the shorter the time period that patients have been actively symptomatic before receiving the first treatment, the better their outcome, and the higher and faster the rate of remission. If patients have been symptomatic persistently for longer periods of time, however, the rate of remission is lower and slower. Thus it is as critical as with stroke, for example, that we identify people early after they develop the signs, so we can implement treatment, shut off the underlying pathophysiological process, and prevent the degenerative effects of the illness from occurring. There are people in the community who are actively symptomatic and either do not know or do not want to receive treatment, or they do not have access to treatment.