Erin Crown, PA-C: The Difficulty in Treating Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia remains one of the more difficult psychiatric disorders to treat, largely because of the different symptoms attached to the disease, as well as the negative side effects like weight gain that come with the medications commonly used.

The disease is challenging largely because the symptoms can manifest so differently in individual patients. Some patients become delusional and hallucinate events that are removed from reality, other patients tend to crave social isolation and lack the ability for emotional responses.

Other comorbidities included paranoia, depression, and impaired motor functions.

While antipsychotics can be effective in treating patients with schizophrenia, the treatment themselves come with a number of side effects that cause schizophrenia patients to go off and on medications, depending on how some of the side effects are impacting their everyday lives.

These side effects include nausea, weight gain, dizziness, and blurred vision because antipsychotic medications change the way brain chemicals act in order to treat certain symptoms such as hallucinations or hearing voices.

In an interview with HCPLive®, Erin C. Crown, PA-C, a physician’s assistant for Oasis Lifecare, explained just why schizophrenia is so difficult to treat and what new treatments could be on the horizon to help this patient population.