What is Schizophrenia?

Many who pick up this book will be learning about schizophrenia for the first time, either because someone they care about has recently been diagnosed, or purely out of academic interest. As such, we aim to paint a very clear and basic picture of the disorder, and avoid jargon as much as possible (though sometimes this cannot be avoided). The first impression many people get about schizo­phrenia, however, is formed before they ever meet someone with the disorder, through exposure in films, television, or literature. Some of these portrayals are fair and accurate depictions of particular aspects of schizophrenia, and may be useful to review in combination with this book to help the reader develop a fuller picture of the disorder (though none is perfect in all regards). For ex­ample, some aspects of John Nash’s struggles with schizophrenia in the film A Beautiful Mind, and those of Nathaniel Ayers in The Soloist, ring true with these individuals’ first- person accounts of the disorder. The reality of schizophrenia has also been reasonably well captured in fictional films such as Clean, Shaven; Donnie Darko; and The Fisher King. Yet, far more commonly schizophrenia is portrayed in an unrealistic and unflattering light by authors and screenwriters, which adds to the stigma and negative views of the disorder held by many who have no first- hand experience of the illness. We will cover some examples of these faulty depictions later in the chapter ‘What is not schizophrenia’, but here, let us continue to describe the main facts about the disorder. Please keep in mind that schizophrenia is one of the most complicated and variable human disorders. Although this is a textbook on schizophrenia, there are no ‘textbook cases’ of schizophrenia. As such, you may sometimes find your­self reading these facts and thinking, ‘that doesn’t sound like what I’ve seen or experienced’. We try to paint as broad a picture of schizophrenia as possible to provide the reader with the best chance of recognizing and understanding schizophrenia when they see it. We use anecdotes about cases to illustrate fea­tures of the disorder, but these may not be relevant to the schizophrenia that you have seen.