On Sunday, Mark Roth of the Pittzburgh Post-Gazette launched an ambitious three-part series on schizophrenia, looking at its toll on individuals; the efforts to understand and treat the disease; and its connection to violent behavior.
The series is part of an even bigger project, a year-long effort to explore five brain disorders. In addition to schizophrenia, they are autism, depression, phobias, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the disorder that is now increasingly being found in former football players. This is a stunning exercise in advance planning, and it apparently means that Roth can't take a day off until sometime in 2014. It might also mean that Roth's services will not be available for spot news coverage of mental illness or other medical stories. But that is the decision that the paper has evidently decided to make.
The schizophrenia series begins with a long profile of a man in his mid-30s with schizophrenia who can still remember the day 15 years ago–after three days of partying, staying awake, and taking LSD–that the "switch got flipped" in his brain and he developed schizophrenia. He is one of the lucky ones. He lives alone, with help. And yet he is still plagued by delusions that he can usually, but not always, identify as delusions. "I can't say I love my life," he tells Roth, "but I like it, I've had a good time with it. And it's OK."
The second part looks at the cognitive problems that people with schizophrenia have to deal with, and the third explores the link between schizophrenia and violence. I didn't see any new ground broken here, but Roth does a good job of conveying the difficulty of understanding and treating schizophrenia.
In the introduction to the series, he describes schizophrenia as something "scientists are just beginning to understand." After reading the series, I see what he means; but I'm still thinking that even that tentative conclusion might be a bit optimistic.
-Paul Raeburn
Leave a Reply