Schizophrenia is a serious mental health disorder that can cause drastic and disabling symptoms that can impair a person’s ability to:
The signs and symptoms of undifferentiated schizophrenia may include a variety of symptoms that don’t fall into a specific subtype. Common undifferentiated schizophrenia symptoms include:
About 1% of people in the U.S. have schizophrenia. However, diagnosis of this disorder poses various challenges, so the number of people who have it may actually be higher.
When diagnosing a mental illness, doctors use the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which lists the various symptoms and criteria that a person has to display and fulfill to be diagnosed with a particular condition.
The previous edition of the DSM (DSM-4) contained five subtypes of schizophrenia that were classified according to the symptoms they would cause. These included paranoid type, disorganized type, catatonic type, hebephrenic/disorganized type, and residual type.
The DSM-4 used the term undifferentiated schizophrenia to describe someone who experiences psychotic symptoms but doesn’t meet the criteria for other subtypes of schizophrenia. The current edition of the book – DSM-5 – doesn’t contain any subtypes of schizophrenia, so the term undifferentiated schizophrenia is no longer in use.
However, because research on mental illness is ongoing and continually presents new information, the DSM is usually updated frequently, so it’s important to be aware of older criteria even if it’s not in use. Also known as undifferential schizophrenia, undifferentiated schizophrenia is a type of schizophrenia that is diagnosed when a person meets the criteria for diagnosis for schizophrenia but cannot be classified into any of the subtypes.
Undifferentiated Schizophrenia Symptoms
According to the DSM-5, a person has schizophrenia if they meet the following criteria: