What is Schizoaffective Disorder?

hi everyone and welcome back to the living wall with schizophrenia channel in today's video I'm going to be discussing what exactly schizoaffective disorder is in a lot of my videos I tend to use schizoaffective disorder and schizophrenia interchangeably but I'm going to be talking about the difference between these two in today's video and what exactly schizoaffective disorder is I get a lot of people asking me to to describe more of the mood disorder or the bipolar scientists get so effective and so I'm going to be talking more about kind of the spectrum of psychotic disorders that involves bipolar and schizophrenia in today's episode but first if you're new here my name is Lauren and I live with schizoaffective disorder and I make videos about what it's like living with schizoaffective disorder or schizophrenia so if you want to see more of this content make sure to subscribe to our Channel and turn on notifications not to miss anything also if you find these videos helpful or enjoy them at all and want to support the creation of future videos please check out our patreon page the link is in the description below we're working really really hard to grow this channel and to keep creating helpful resources for you all and so if you would like to help support the creation of that please check out the patreon page we really appreciate any support thank you ok so diving right into it what is schizoaffective disorder so schizoaffective disorder is basically the combination of schizophrenia and a major mood disorder such as bipolar or depression ok so starting off I'm going to describe a bit about what schizophrenia entails and what the symptoms of schizophrenia are so there are positive and negative symptoms and positive symptoms include things like hallucinations delusions paranoid thought and those sorts of things and then the negative symptoms include more of like the kind of depressive symptoms so lack of energy lack of motivation lack of pleasure and it's kind of like the removal of behaviors there are also some cognitive symptoms that occur in schizophrenia because it is primarily a thought disorder where as bipolar on the other hand or depression are primarily a mood disorder and so bipolar is kind of it's commonly thought that people with bipolar have these like extreme mood fluctuations very like sporadically but that's not really what bipolar is typically typically it's more prolonged periods of either mania or depression so me Mia is when a person has really elevated mood and they have more impulsive behavior like overspending or gambling or stuff like that hyper sexuality and everything's just kind of on overdrive for them and they're really kind of just amped up whereas the depressive side of bipolar and as depression is more like lack of energy lack of motivation to do things lack of interest in things you otherwise would have found interesting or engaging feeling sad mood and that's kind of the extremes of bipolar disorder and also the lows of depression and so bipolar disorder typically is characterized by at least one week of mania or hospitalizing or SAS episode requiring hospitalization and two weeks of depression so that's kind of the diagnostic criteria for diagnosing bipolar now when we're talking about schizoaffective disorder it's kind of a combination of both of these things of schizophrenia and of the major mood disorder whether it's bipolar or depression now before getting too much into schizoaffective disorder as it relates to bipolar and depression I think it or bipolar and schizophrenia I think it's really important to kind of discuss the spectrum of psychotic disorders so 50% of people diagnosed with bipolar disorder have some sort of psychotic features attached to their symptoms in their diagnosis and this is often referred to as bipolar with psychotic features and that's kind of at one end of the continuum of the psychosis spectrum and then at the other end is schizophrenia and so within this spectrum of psychotic disorders Sly's schizoaffective disorder which is kind of again a combination of both of them it's kind of like there's a bit of a degree of anticipated better prognosis as you get closer to the back because people with bipolar typically have more prolonged periods of recovery than people with schizophrenia do and so it's typically thought that people with bipolar have a little bit better of a diagnosis than people with schizoaffective and people with schizoaffective have a little bit better of a pregnant prognosis than people with schizophrenia but this is not at all hard and fast and the occurrence of symptoms can be vastly different regardless of your diagnosis and can have varying degrees of effect on an individual again regardless of your diagnosis so now some people might be wondering what is the difference between bipolar with psychotic features and schizoaffective disorder good question there's really not a lot of difference the main difference is that bipolar with psychotic features they're experiencing the psychotic features at the same time as a mood disturbance so either mania or depression whereas schizoaffective disorder the criteria for being diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder is that you experience psychosis or psychotic symptoms without any mood episode present so for me my kind of journey of diagnosis began with being diagnosed with depression when I was first experiencing symptoms because that was what I was presenting with the most then it kind of graduated to being diagnosed with bipolar disorder because I was beginning to display characteristics of mania as well as depression and then I began to have psychotic symptoms so I was diagnosed with bipolar with psychotic features and then the psychotic disorder psychotic symptoms began to persist without any depression or mania present and so my diagnosis was changed to schizoaffective disorder which it currently is now and that feels that feels accurate for me and feels like something that fits how I perceive my symptoms coming back to the kind of spectrum though between bipolar and schizophrenia it's really interesting to note that there are very similar brain abnormalities shown on MRI scans in people with bipolar with psychotic features and people with schizophrenia and people with schizoaffective disorder and so it must be something similar in terms of B on the same sort of spectrum of illness because the same the same brain abnormalities are found in both illnesses now the brain abnormalities are more market and people with schizophrenia but there are still similarities along the spectrum it's also interesting that treatment with medication is very very similar for people with schizophrenia and schizoaffective the treatment for both of those is practically identical the only exception being that for me anyway when I am I'm usually only on antipsychotics but when I'm experiencing a mood disturbance I generally am added mood stabilizer as well so that's really the only real difference between schizophrenia and schizoaffective treatment and it's really interesting that bipolar with psychotic features can also be treated with antipsychotics so again that's kind of hinting at something similar between these illnesses on the spectrum now I kind of walked you through my diagnostic journey in terms of moving from depression to bipolar to bipolar with psychotic features to schizoaffective disorder and you may be somewhere along that journey of proper diagnosis as well but what I really want to convey is that the label and the diagnosis doesn't really matter so much as it matters that you are really aware of the symptoms that you're experiencing and you're really working to convey that as effectively as possible with your doctor with your psychiatrist because it really it like we've shown that it's a spectrum so it really doesn't matter where you follow on that spectrum so long as your symptoms are being properly managed and properly addressed I think that's the most important part okay so basically to summarize bipolar schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder all lie within the same sort of continuum or spectrum and schizoaffective disorder is defined as being a combination of both schizophrenia and a major mood disorder such as depression or bipolar disorder so I think that there is kind of like a growing consciousness around this idea of the spectrum between bipolar and schizophrenia I think that there is increasingly more dialogue around psychosis as a condition as opposed to separating them into bipolar schizo affective and schizophrenia and there's kind of more of a approach of it being a continuum of psychosis and the continuum of psychosis as a brain disease rather than as these individual mental illnesses and so it's going to be interesting to kind of see where things go in the next 10 20 years or so as the psychiatric community begins to kind of reexamine the criteria for each of these diagnoses so I'm really interested to hear your thoughts as well would you be more comfortable with the psychiatric community kind of approaching this more as a continuum of psychotic disorders and just understanding that people fall somewhere along the spectrum or do you prefer having a specific diagnosis like bipolar with psychotic features or schizoaffective disorder or schizophrenia let me know what your thoughts are what you're comfortable with or what what your thoughts are on the whole topic so thank you so much for watching this video I hope you liked it or found it helpful in some way or learn something new and if you did please make sure to like it and also don't forget to subscribe to our channel so as not to miss and either new content that we put out and just one more a reminder if you would like to support the creation of future videos like this one please make sure to check out our patreon page the link is in the description below so thank you so much for watching and as always wishing you and your loved ones good health see you in the next video bye [Music]

Channel: Living Well with Schizophrenia

Views: 368,656

Keywords: schizoaffective disorder, schizophrenia, schizoaffective, bipolar, bipolar disorder, mental health, mental illness, psychosis, psychotic disorders, psychosis spectrum, schizophrenia spectrum, schizoaffective disorder bipolar type, schizoaffective disorder depressive type, schizoaffective disorder symptoms, schizoaffective disorder vs schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder vs bipolar with psychotic features, bipolar with psychotic features, living well with schizophrenia

Id: oIvng9WbISo

Length: 10min 38sec (638 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 08 2020