Investigating the Etiological Factors of Schizophrenia and Its Diagnostic Overlap with Dissociative Identity Disorder

This work is trying to investigate the causes of schizophrenia and how it is similar to dissociative identity disorder. The exact cause of schizophrenia stays unknown, but there are risk factors for this mental disorder. This paper includes major and recent findings about the causes of schizophrenia. Over the years, scientists have found that genetic, environmental, and neurodevelopmental factors all contribute to the chance of developing schizophrenia to some extent, such as gene mutations and stressful life events. While dissociative identity disorder is a completely different mental illness, it is often misunderstood by people. People have an opinion that it has the exact symptoms of schizophrenia, which is not true. DID makes people have different personalities, and for patients who have schizophrenia, delusion and hallucination are common symptoms. This work reviews the overlapping symptoms and causes among schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder, indicating the reason for misconceptions and misdiagnoses of these two.