People who have schizophrenia were once regular people just like us before this terrible disease strikes their lives. As Nancy C. Andreasen, M.D., PH.D states in her book Brave New Brain: Conquering Mental Illness in the Era of the Genome:.
Scott, a regular teenage boy, started acting weird and disoriented. Young Scott had Schizophrenia. The following is an excerpt from a letter that Scott wrote to his mother and father. "I"m so confused. I am so scared. I can't describe this to anyone. I have to deal with this alone. I used to be one of the guys. But now I"m an outcast. Why is this happening? What did I do? I've completely lost control over what is happening to me, but I don't even know what it is. Could it really be that I am losing my mind, like one of the people in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? If I am, then I should just kill myself. I don't want to keep living if it is going to be this bad the rest of my life.
The causes of schizophrenia are still unknown, so it is important for it to be properly diagnosed. There are many types of treatment for schizophrenia. One type of treatment for it is a mental hospital. There is much controversy on this subject, according to Theodore Lidz, "when there is a schizophrenic in a hospital that the doctors need to work on his socialization skills. I believe that they need to know how to make decisions through participation with a group. It would be good for the patient to help make decisions for other people. Schizophrenics at mental hospitals are at a disadvantage because they emphasize so much on patient-doctor relations and individual psychotherapy rather than socialization"(118). .
Other than a mental hospital, standard treatment is medication. The only problem with this is that a drug that works well for one schizophrenic may not work well for another schizophrenic, which makes make's things a lot more complicated then they already are.