About Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a severe mental health condition. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, there are over 685,000 people diagnosed with the illness in the UK. There are 24 million diagnosed with schizophrenia globally. About 1 in every 100 people get diagnosed at some point in their life.
People with schizophrenia may suffer from the following:
- Hallucinations, hearing voices or seeing things others don't
- Delusions and strong beliefs that others don't share
- Paranoia
- Disorganised thinking and speech
- Feeling disconnected from emotions
- Difficulty concentrating
On average, people have symptoms for at least six months before being diagnosed with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia can affect anyone, although it usually has its onset in late adolescence or early adulthood. According to the Journal of Medical Economics schizophrenia has the highest societal cost of all mental disorders, costing more than any illness in the country.
Excerpts from the memoir Toy Fights - A Boyhood
'It turned into a seemingly endless horror […] The pain took the form of an endlessly imploding terror, simultaneously shrinking and expanding […] Unfortunately, your immediate task is to decide if you can handle the pain of being anything at all, given the knowledge that hell can exist right here, right now, in the park, in the supermarket, the bedroom […] I couldn’t locate myself anywhere, and wasn’t having my own thoughts. My mind had been rented out to strangers, and they were breaking all the good things […]
By kind permission of Donald Paterson OBE FRSE FRSL
Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews, Scotland
