First person account: living with schizophrenia.

The article that follows is part of the Schizophrenia Bulletin's ongoing First Person Accounts series. We hope that mental health profession-als—the Bulletin's primary audi-ence—will take this opportunity to learn about the issues and difficulties confronted by consumers of mental health care. In addition, we hope that these accounts will give patients and families a better sense of not being alone in confronting the problems that can be anticipated by persons with serious emotional difficulties. We welcome other contributions from patients, ex-patients, or family members. Our major editorial requirement is that such contributions be clearly written and organized, and that a novel or unique aspect of schizophrenia be described, with special emphasis on points that will be important for professionals. Clini-cians who see articulate patients, with experiences they believe should be shared, might encourage these patients to submit their articles to My daughter, Cindy, and I get together every 2 weeks for lunch— something we can now both enjoy. Sometimes we eat in a local restaurant , sometimes in a snack bar on the grounds near her dorm. She is in her mid-thirties and I notice with sadness that she has a few gray hairs. The sadness is because she hasn't really enjoyed or participated in life yet, but nature continues its march. Now she and I both have gray hair. Our conversation is rather disjointed, as Cindy has difficulty understanding my words most of the time. She struggles valiantly to answer my questions, and occasionally an appropriate response comes forth. Now, after 17 years, we sometimes exchange two or three sentences which actually have the give and take of real conversation. Cindy has been living under the shadow of schizophrenia these past 17 years. She has a severely debili-tating form of this devastating and demoralizing brain disease. Schizo-phrenia is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain that produces a break with reality—not a split per-sonality—and the distorted dialogue going on in her head controls her thought processes with often bizarre results. She has been a patient at a State hospital for 11 years and was in and out of the hospital for 5 years before that. This "fog," as she calls it, descended on her at age 20 when she was starting her third year of college. During the first 5 years she got progressively worse, a course that has led to a long-term stay in a mental hospital. …