Schizophrenia 5

Dangerous Mind Schizophrenia is a severly disabilitating disease that has stricken the lives of almost two million people in the United States alone (Keefe 20). Since this disease is so devastating the majority of people that suffer from it either live on the streets or in mental institutions. In fact, forty percent of the beds in American mental hospitals are occupied by patients with schizophrenia (Hamilton 145). According to Hamilton the overall chances of a person to …

…months. With these new antipsychotic drugs, though, the stay has been reduced to just days. In fact a person who takes the drugs has a 3-out-of-5 chance (60 percent) of not being rehospitalized (Keefe 164). These antipsychotics work by blocking certain receptors of certain types of neurotransmitters in the brain. For instance chlorpromazine is an atipsychotic that blocks the receptorsfor dopamine, which as I explained is believed to be the cause of most symptoms of schizophrenia (Anderson 97).