Schizophrenia in Couple and Family Therapy

Synonyms

This entry applies to illnesses on the schizophrenia spectrum, including schizoaffective and schizophreniform disorder.

Introduction

Individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia typically exhibit a combination of positive symptoms such as unusual perceptual experiences or beliefs not shared by others and negative symptoms (e.g., having little to say, low motivation, difficulty experiencing pleasure). More recently, the prominence of the cognitive impairments in schizophrenia, such as difficulties in attention, memory, concentration, and perspective-taking, have been increasingly recognized. These cognitive impairments are more strongly associated with the broad and pervasive array of social and occupational deficits often found in the disorder than the more commonly recognized positive symptoms (Green et al. 2015).

While disorders on the schizophrenia spectrum used to be viewed as having an extremely poor prognosis, a series of landmark studies have demonstrated that many...