Schizophrenia

Ambivalence is the term for having mixed feelings about something. Doctors once considered it a key symptom of schizophrenia, but this is no longer the case ...

Healthcare professionals can rule these conditions out if the individual has not experienced any major depressive or manic episodes alongside their other symptoms for a significant length of time. The SAS uses a questionnaire to evaluate ambivalence as a schizotypal symptom or trait. Nowadays, healthcare professionals do not consider ambivalence to be definitive of schizophrenia. In older studies, experts sometimes used the Schizotypal Ambivalence Scale (SAS) to assess the degree to which a person was experiencing certain forms of ambivalence. The medical community no longer considers ambivalence an essential characteristic of this condition, but some evidence suggests that ambivalence is more prevalent among people with schizophrenia. Recent studies indicate only a weak link between ambivalence and schizophrenia, and some evidence suggests that it might actually be a more common symptom of mood disorders.