Childhood schizophrenia

Behavior Therapist Lisa Gonsalves, MA, explains what can cause schizophrenia in children and what the symptoms of childhood schizophrenia are, and shares advice for parents on how to help treat it
Causes, Symptoms and Treatments for Schizophrenia In Children
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Childhood schizophrenia

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Childhood schizophrenia is different from adult schizophrenia because schizophrenia typically. It´s a biological condition. The onset is from young adulthood, maybe late teens. Child schizophrenia is caused by typically maybe from environmental issues, trauma, post traumatic stress disorder, that type of thing where a child may have delusions that are useful to them. So if they hear a voice, it´s maybe something that they go to to feel better or it´s like an attention seeking method. My son at the time we were having a divorce. He had some depression. A babysitter showed him a psychothriller video that was very disturbing to him and then he started to have behaviors that appeared to be psychotic. We did get him some therapy. The therapist did say make sure that these voices that he hears are not useful because if they are useful to him now for attention or because it makes him feel better or whatnot, then it´s going to become a habit that´s very hard to break later and then that´s when you see like some permanent psychosis. So now he is fine and perfect. We got through that by irradicating, making sure that when he heard those voices, there was a negative consequence at the time or the potential to have a negative consequence, in which case it become unuseful for him.

Behavior Therapist Lisa Gonsalves, MA, explains what can cause schizophrenia in children and what the symptoms of childhood schizophrenia are, and shares advice for parents on how to help treat it

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Lisa Gonsalves, MA

Behavior Therapist

In her career in youth development, Lisa Gonsalves, MA, has served youth populations across the globe over the past 25 years. Her professional experience includes creating, developing, and administering a variety of programs, development systems, and methods for young people as coordinator, counselor, and instructor for ages four through 24.  The various youth populations she has served include school age children with behavioral or mental heath diagnoses, urban and rural at-risk adolescents, foreign students, gay youth, socio-economically underprivileged, and middle class youth. She has a master’s degree in Social Policy for Youth Services.

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