The Dopamine hypothesis and the multiple phases of Schizophrenia: A misdiagnosis that leads to mistreatment.

Abstract

The clinical and parametric analysis of schizophrenia show a multifaceted symptom phase in which many other major categories of mental disorders can be diagnosed. This is leads to the complicated nature of schizophrenia both in its diagnosis and interventions. Even with the claims of high-tech diagnostic processes, advanced low side-effect antipsychotic drugs, and research in this area, high rate misdiagnosis and under-treatment of schizophrenic patients, especially in developing nations, are very high. The major categories of schizophrenia that distinguishes it from other mental disorders, are psychotic features, which have been linked to neurocircuitry, genetic vulnerability, and environmental exposures. Yet vulnerability theories have implicated psychodynamic processes, cognitive abilities, personality trait, interpersonal and family upbringing as precipitating and escalating factors of schizophrenia. However, due to its ravaging effects in visuospatial, visuoperceptual and visuoconstruction abilities, neuropsychologists, as well as psychiatrists, are in continuous controversial debate as what may constitute the actual etiology of schizophrenia. Even though with monozygotic twins and the experiment with amphetamine, chlorpromazine, and phenothiazines, have unequivocally depicted schizophrenia as a genetically transmitted mental disorder, yet obvious difference in symptom expressions, especially with cognitive degeneration, have led researchers to the study of dopamine receptor genes, which they believe could hold the key to the multifaceted nature of schizophrenia. The search is centered on the dopamine hypothesis. The analysis of this claim, to which this paper is interest in, will centre around Dopaminergic pathways, which are neural pathways in the brain that transmit the neurotransmitter dopamine from one region of the brain to another.