Psychosocial Factors in Schizoaffective Disorder

Psychosocial Factors in Schizoaffective Disorder

Schizoaffective disorder is a serious mental illness which directly and negatively impacts a patient’s quality of life. After a prolonged period, patients often end up friendless. Also, people who suffer from such critical conditions as schizoaffective disorder often live in poverty and may even end up homeless. Clearly, family and social support is very important in improving quality of life for schizoaffective disorder patients alongside from the professional treatment they get from psychiatrists.

Psychosocial factors include family and social support. Image: Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Quality of life often declines before the psychotic symptoms even develop. Indeed, since schizoaffective disorder includes elements from bipolar disorder or depression, depressive symptoms may be present even before the psychotic features are evident. A very serious problem for the carers of persons suffering from this mental illness is that often the patients refuse to believe that there is something wrong with them. To them, their delusions or hallucinations represent reality and they do not think that anything needs to be addressed by a specialist.

Further, another challenge faced by those suffering from mental illnesses requiring treatment by antipsychotic medication are the potential side effects. For example, risperidone is often prescribed to treat psychotic symptoms, but may produce an intense feeling of restlessness and an inability to sit still, among other things. Some patients suffer so much from the side effects that they prefer to stop taking the medication altogether, which is very dangerous and very detrimental to the course of their disease. How is anyone ever going to get better if they stop taking their medication?

In addition to their illness, individuals with schizoaffective disorder may suffer from poverty and homelessness. Image: Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Paranoid ideation may resume if the medication is stopped. Indeed, to reiterate, the patient may not understand that the delusions are part of their illness until the antipsychotic medication takes effect. For instance, a particular young man had ideas of reference and reacted negatively to any attempt by his family to have him seen by a psychiatrist. Overtime, he was eventually convinced to seek help and after a few weeks on antipsychotic medication he himself understood that his erotomanic delusions and ideas of reference were a product of his mind and of his mental illness.