Welcome to the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Podcast. The podcast to help you in your journey

towards becoming a wise, empathic, genuine and connected mental health professional.

I'm your host, Dr. David Puder, a psychiatrist who splits his time practicing psychopharmacology,

individual and group psychotherapy, medical director of a day treatment program,

medical education research, and teaching residents and medical students.

Okay, so I am back here, actually, at Patton State Hospital with Dr. Cummings,

and today we're going to be talking about schizophrenia. We're first going to go over, you know,

what is schizophrenia, where characteristic of the hallucinations, delusions,

the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. How do you differentiate this from other things?

You know, how do we make sense of the different environmental factors that increase the rate of schizophrenia?

We're going to look at the why of schizophrenia, the genetic influences, the brain changes.

We're going to look at the rates of crime in schizophrenic patients and, you know,

do people with mental illness commit a lot of crimes? Do they? Are they responsible for a lot of the violent crimes going on?

We'll also talk about medications and discuss some of the controversy over, you know,

is it good to leave someone on medications long term for schizophrenia?

We'll talk about a little bit on the research that's out there on long term studies,

and if it is a good idea to, you know, treat someone inevitably or, I mean, not inevitably,

but continuously, and how to best sort of optimize someone's long-term trajectory with schizophrenia.

So I'm here with Dr. Cummings.

Okay, schizophrenia is essentially a cluster or spectrum of illnesses that are related to each other genetically

that are characterized at their heart by psychotic symptoms, psychosis being defined as a loss of ability to test reality.

All of us, as we get sensory input, kind of automatically in the background,

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