Schizophrenia and What It Means for the Rest of Us

This is one of those things that I am not sure how to get into words that mean anything. But no one is reading this anyway, so whatever.

I know a few schizophrenics fairly well, two of them in particular. Last night, I was talking with one of them. She was in a very bad space and I was at a loss trying to explain to her how the things she was seeing and hearing and people she perceived to be doing things to her were not real. "I don't know," she said to my insistence that she could cognitively push the beasties out of her mind.

She's right, of course. These hallucinations are very real for schizophrenics and it is very difficult to watch people you care about be consumed by them. No one has really hit on a method of addressing this, which is sad because schizophrenics have as much of a right to a life untrammeled by mental illness as so the rest of us bipolars and depressives, et al.

The current answer is meds, meds, meds--atypical antipsychotics, most commonly. Unfortunately, these meds don't treat schizophrenia well for about half of the people who take them. For the half who get some level of relief, the meds are great, despite the wreckage they do to patients' bodies. I am frustrated by this state of affairs because, honestly, schizophrenics have a much harder road to travel than do any of us with bipolar disorder or depression or anxiety. We've got mental illnesses, but we've also got something that we can work on, something that doesn't destroy our minds and relationships with reality on the level that schizophrenia does.

It's more unfair than almost anything in human existence.

I am completely at a loss as to know what to do for schizophrenics, and it angers me and breaks my heart all at once. But there is a piece of me that believes the rest of us with mental illness--especially those of us who, like me, have managed to somehow carve a decent life out of the situation--have an obligation to schizophrenics. We've got to do something to help these people because all the meds, researchers, doctors, social workers and families in the world aren't getting the job done. These poor folks need to have their lives redeemed.

I wish to god I knew what to do to make that happen. But then even god seems to be at a loss, too.