Identify the positive symptom of Schizophrenia from the following options:

Hallucinations

The correct answer is Option (1) → Hallucinations

The symptoms of schizophrenia can be grouped into three categories, viz. positive symptoms (i.e. excesses of thought, emotion, and behaviour), negative symptoms (i.e. deficits of thought, emotion, and behaviour), and psychomotor symptoms.

Positive symptoms are ‘pathological excesses’ or ‘bizarre additions’ to a person’s behaviour. Delusions, disorganised thinking and speech, heightened perception and hallucinations, and inappropriate affect are the ones most often found in schizophrenia.

Negative symptoms are ‘pathological deficits’ and include poverty of speech, blunted and flat affect, loss of volition, and social withdrawal. People with schizophrenia show alogia or poverty of speech, i.e. a reduction in speech and speech content. Many people with schizophrenia show less anger, sadness, joy, and other feelings than most people do. Thus they have blunted affect. Some show no emotions at all, a condition known as flat affect. Also patients with schizophrenia experience avolition, or apathy and an inability to start or complete a course of action. People with this disorder may withdraw socially and become totally focused on their own ideas and fantasies.