AN ENCOUNTER with untreated schizophrenia can be a deeply unsettling experience that leaves no doubt about the debilitating nature of the condition. Who hasn鈥檛 averted their gaze from a person engaged in an agitated conversation with someone who isn鈥檛 there?
Psychiatric medicine has lessened the frequency of such encounters. Where people with schizophrenia have access to medical care, their hallucinations can now be well controlled with antipsychotic drugs.
That鈥檚 progress, but it helps those afflicted with the condition less than it may appear: even after the voices in their heads are silenced, their ability to function in society remains blunted by cognitive deficits that make it hard to process information, learn, remember and plan. Too often, despair brought on by a lifetime of struggle ends in suicide.
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鈥淭oo often, despair brought on by a lifetime of struggle with schizophrenia ends in suicide鈥�
That鈥檚 why the latest, extremely promising results from a 鈥渂rain training鈥� approach to treating schizophrenia (see 鈥淢ind gym helps life with schizophrenia鈥�) are so welcome. If the computer-based tools can be further refined, there is real hope of restoring patients鈥� cognitive abilities to the healthy range, and maybe even safeguarding them against decline in the first place.
The key test will be whether the lab results translate into significant improvements in quality of life. Particularly important will be of Yale University, who is testing whether such training improves performance in the workplace. This will be important in societies that marginalise those who are unable to hold down a job, particularly for people with genuine difficulties who are wrongly labelled lazy or stupid.
Alongside further developments in treatment, there needs to be a better public understanding of the problems faced by those with schizophrenia. Over the past decade or so, psychiatrists who specialise in the condition have come to realise that the cognitive deficits are more debilitating than the hallucinations.
Word of this revised understanding has been slow to get out, however, in part because the official criteria used to define schizophrenia 鈥� laid down in a volume published by the American Psychiatric Association called the (DSM) 鈥� do not include the .
That should in the , due in 2012, but efforts to inform the public of the full nature of schizophrenia need not wait until then. Schizophrenia has been misunderstood and misrepresented perhaps more than any other disease. Rather than averting our eyes, we should do all we can to offer a helping hand.
