Schizophrenia

            
             The most puzzling of all mental abnormalities is the psychosis, known as Schizophrenia. Evidence indicates strongly that schizophrenia is a severe disturbance in the brain's functioning. It's caused by many factors- including changes in the chemistry of the brain, changes in the structure of the brain and genetic factors.
             "Schizophrenia" is a discordant and cruel term, just like the disease. (E. Fuller Torrey,M.D.) In 1843, Dorothea Dix appeared at the Massachusetts court to state that the state of insane persons confined within this common wealth in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens, chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience. In 1985 witnesses testified for the senate subcommittee on the Handicapped regarding staff abuse of people resided in mental Hospitals, including "kicking or otherwise striking patients, sexual advances and rape, verbal threats of injury and other forms of intimidation." (E. Fuller Torrey, M.D.) In 1982 The New York Times reported on nine mental patients, placed with a fee in a foster home operator, who were kept in a shed with no toilet or running water and "two vicious dogs chained outside the small room" to make sure they did not run away. In the 1980's newspapers regularly reported seriously mentally ill persons freezing on the streets in wi!.
             nter. It became common, when a homeless man froze to death a few blocks from the White House, the Washington Post "routinely reported his death as a minor part of a weather story." The front page of The New York Times featured a picture of a city worker "trying to give lunch to a man who lives in a box in Battery Park." The picture showed a make shift shelter made of pieces of cardboard on a park bench. In Massachusetts, "two small defenseless street people" were beaten to death. (E. Fuller Torrey, M.D.)The local newspaper editorized that as it was like having "rabbits forced to live in the company with dogs.