The Mental Disorder Psychosis and Schizophrenia in Adolescence

The brain has always fascinated me. Even the simple idea that I can hear words in my head without actually saying them is a mystery of the world to me. Unusual disorders and diseases have also always caught my interest. I arrived at my article of choice by searching ‘psychosis’ and ‘schizophrenia’J further narrowed down my search options by setting the parameters to that of adolescence, the paper being written in English, and selecting journal article. After I set those parameters, I was left with eleven articles.

Hypotheses about schizophrenia have been going on forever. it has been hypothesized that greater paternal age has increased risks of schizophrenia. Direct evidence has never been found. Schizophrenia has been thought of to be a de novo mutation. meaning it was not possessed or transmitted by either parent. The American Journal of Psychiatry conducted an article where scientists analyzed data from all known cases of schizophrenia in Denmark between 1955 and 1992. The study was developed to understand if there was a correlation between later paternal age and risk of psychosis in their offspring.

Out of the many cases that happened between this period of time, they recorded the age of the father at the birth of each one of his children to see if the father‘s age with the first born child had an effect on his other children later in life. From the data that was collected it seems to show, according to Patterson (2011), “,.,the risk of schizophrenia increased when increasing paternal age at the firstborn child”.

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The real number that was of importance was that of the father at the age the first child was born, not of his later children. Parents that choose to have children later in life should be aware of these risks. This study did not support the most popular hypothesis of schizophrenia at the time, which was de novo mutations, This is what I always accepted with schizophrenia, was that it as a somewhat random event.

l have heard of families having one member with psychosis, while everyone else in the family was not affected. Other times I have also heard where it is common between siblings. The documentary that I have watched on schizophrenia was a story of two siblings that both had the disease. This most closely represent the study in this article about the father’s age of the first born child. On PsychINFO, in the column to the right ofthe abstract of my chosen article is a link to all the references used in the journal article. I chose an article done by Torrey E. Filler, as it also had to do with paternal age and schizophrenia, The new link takes you back to PycthFO but to the page of the reference article, where you can use the convent “find at WSU’ button. A list of where to find the article at WSU will pop up with either more links to libraries WSU has access to, or to the exact book here on campus.