These symptoms often include:
🔹 Decreased motivation (avolition)
🔹 Blunted or flat affect
🔹 Reduced emotional range
🔹 Paucity of speech (alogia)
Unlike positive symptoms, negative symptoms respond poorly to antipsychotic medications—even clozapine, our most effective agent for treatment-resistant illness, offers limited relief.
These deficits are often chronic, functionally disabling, and deeply impact quality of life.
Tackling negative symptoms will be the next frontier in improving long-term outcomes in schizophrenia. We need innovative approaches, novel mechanisms, and more research focused on this under-addressed domain.