Schizophrenia - Medication

Professor David Lewis explains that positive symptoms of schizophrenia are currently more treatable than the negative symptoms.

Currently available treatments for schizophrenia are primarily directed at the positive symptoms, the delusions and hallucinations. For the treatment of those symptoms we use drugs that are called anti-psychotics. Those drugs, which have been around now for about fifty years and which exist in newer forms are fairly, but not completely, effective at reducing the positive symptoms of the disorder. What we lack at present are drugs that would reduce the negative symptoms of the disorder. That is, it would improve the individual’s motivation, emotional experience and expression, ability to produce speech. We also lack medications at present that improve the cognitive impairments of the disorder – the problems in attention, in making judgments, and in certain types of thinking processes that, in many ways, are the most debilitating features of the illness.