The psychotic symptoms typically include hallucinations and delusions.

• Hallucinations: Hallucinations involve sensing things others can't, such as hearing voices, feeling touches on the skin, or seeing things that aren't there.

• Delusions: A delusion is a strong, false belief that may seem illogical to others, like believing you're royalty or can control the weather. Persecutory delusions involve feeling in danger, such as thinking someone is watching through hidden cameras or trying to cause harm

The mood symptoms often include:

• ‍Manic type symptoms: Mania involves high energy, excitability, rapid speech, and sometimes risky behaviours like drug use, sexual behaviour, or overspending. Hypomania is a milder form, often more manageable.‍
• Depressive type symptoms: You may experience becoming withdraw, loss of motivation and confidence, tearfulness, hopelessness, suicidal ideation ‍
• Mixed type symptoms: When your symptoms can switch between mania and depressive type symptoms.

Like many mental disorders, the exact causes of schizoaffective disorder is unknown. Evidence suggests that many factors can influence the onset of schizoaffective including:

• Childhood trauma  - experiencing traumatic events during childhood, before one is properly able to comprehend what is happening, may be a trigger for mental health conditions later in life.
• Stress  - Everyone has a different vulnerability to stressful and traumatic events
• Genetics  - You may be more likely to develop schizoaffective disorder if someone you are closely related to has bi-polar or schizophrenia.
• Brain chemistry  - Some professionals suggest that schizoaffective disorder is a result of an imbalance in the brain