Cognitive Explanation of Schizophrenia: Implications of the Theory

Schizophrenia is a severe mental illness that affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. It is a complex disorder that involves a wide range of symptoms, including hallucinations, delusions, and disordered thinking. The cognitive explanation of schizophrenia is revealed in this essay as one of the prominent theories that attempt to explain the causes and symptoms of this illness. This theory suggests that schizophrenia results from a dysfunction in cognitive processes, such as attention, memory, and perception. This essay will also explore implications of this theory for the treatment and management of this disorder

The cognitive approach, which focuses on the role of processing, as schizophrenia is characterised by disruption to normal thought processing. Reduced processing in the ventral striatum is associated with the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, and reduced processing of the information in the temporal and cingulate gyri are associated with positive symptoms like hallucinations. Frith et al. identified two types of dysfunctional thought processing 'metarepresentation and central control'. Metarepresentation is the cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour so we can look at our own intentions and goals, therefore dysfunction would disrupt our ability to reflect on our actions and behaviour, which could explain hallucinations and voices. Central control is the ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions instead, which would explain why when this is dysfunctional, schizophrenic sufferers have symptoms like disorganised speech and thoughts because each word triggers association.

There is strong evidence for dysfunctional information processing. Stirling et al. compared schizophrenic patients to a control group on a range of cognitive tasks including the Stroop test where participants see colours in word text, but they appear to be a different colour, so when the schizophrenic patients did this task, they took over twice as long to identify the colour because of the dysfunctional central control. This supports the claim that schizophrenic patients have a different information processing system to the average population. However this doesn't tell us anything about where the cognitions or the schizophrenia came from, so it lacks explanation as to where schizophrenia has originated, but it does tell us what causes certain symptoms. This would be useful when trying to treat symptoms, but not useful when it comes to preventing schizophrenia in patients or discovering what caused it.

The cognitive approach has practical application in reducing positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia through brief intervention programmes. This is a strength because the cognitive approach has influenced treatment, and therefore improving the living conditions of many patients. However, there is evidence that contradicts the explanation. Studies of brain damaged patients have shown that they often experience similar cognitive deficits to schizophrenics, such as problems with attention. However, despite this, they do not develop symptoms of schizophrenia, so the cognitive explanation alone is unlikely to be valid as if it was, the brain damaged patients should have developed these symptoms, so the cognitive approach may only be valid to a certain extent, and other factors may play a role.