Schizophrenia Takes Major Toll on Children

It's an illness that doesn't strike often, but one that inevitably has a tremendous effect on the lives of those few children who suffer from it.

Schizophrenia is diagnosed in fewer than 1 in 30,000 American kids each year. Symptoms are similar to those seen in the around 1 percent of Americans who suffer from adult-onset schizophrenia: hallucinations, irrational thoughts and even violent behavior.

But schizophrenia will have an added impact on kids, because of the developmental delays it causes. Schizophrenic children won't learn social cues or proper hygiene, and often fail to make friends or perform academically.

Symptoms can also be mistaken for typical childhood phases. Kids often create imaginary worlds, struggle with bed-wetting and cleanliness, or act out in ways that seem irrational to adults.

But while the figments of childhood imagination are usually friendly, kids with schizophrenia often experience violent, scary and threatening delusions. An ABC News report on childhood schizophrenia described the plight of 9-year-old Rebecca Stancil, who "has been haunted by images of wolves, men with monster faces, and shadows and shapes that scamper around a darkened room."

"A lot of the time, the children will say that they have voices that are telling them very unpleasant things," Dr. Judith Rapoport, director of the National Institutes of Mental Health's childhood psychiatry division, said in an interview with Oprah Winfrey. "Often the voices are telling them very bad things -- talking about death, talking about things that a child should do or that might be done to them."

And while adult sufferers often have sudden "episodes" that signal a problem, schizophrenia seems to develop progressively in children. Often parents don't recognize that something is seriously wrong until their child experiences a fundamental break from reality.

The root cause of schizophrenia at any age remains unknown. Researchers suspect that brain dysfunction is the culprit, but don't know the precise mechanism, or why it strikes so early in some patients.

Studies have identified several risk factors, including some that might help explain schizophrenia's early onset. A family history of the illness, malnutrition in the womb, and childhood abuse or trauma have all been linked to the development of schizophrenia.

In January, a study of rhesus monkeys confirmed that those whose mothers suffered the flu while pregnant exhibited brain changes typically seen in schizophrenic patients.

Treating childhood schizophrenia is another challenge. Most anti-psychotic drugs haven't been tested on kids, because so few ever need them. Doctors often prescribe the medications off-label, meaning drugs are doled out to an age group that hasn't been FDA approved.

Children also often require special academic, social and hygienic training to grow into adults who can cope with the world around them.

And they'll likely spend the rest of their lives struggling with some degree of dysfunction.

"Very few really ever reach a point that no one knows they have schizophrenia," Rapoport said. "Some degree of impairment remains, and the degree of support that they have from their school, their family, their community, makes a huge difference on what the rest of their life is going to be like."