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Schizophrenia Bulletin Advance Access originally published online on May 17, 2006
Schizophrenia Bulletin 2007 33(4):846-847; doi:10.1093/schbul/sbj080
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Why Having a Mental Illness Is Not Like Having Diabetes

Anonymous1

Keywords: personal account / end user / schizoaffective

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

A number of times during the course of my illness I have been told by health professionals that it is useful to think of having a mental illness (in my case schizoaffective disorder) as having a lifelong disease that requires lifelong management and drug treatment—in fact, just like diabetes, a well-known disease affecting a large proportion of the population. Diabetics, so the story goes, need to accept that they have an illness that will require treatment for the rest of their lives; and if they continue the treatment, they will maintain their health insofar as this is possible, while if they discontinue treatment, they will suffer dire consequences, including blindness, loss of limbs, diabetic coma, and so on. Looked at in this light, treatment of a mental illness is just the same; if medication and other treatments are continued, . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Hospital Experience
 

   Attitude of Family and Friends
 

   The Disease Course
 

   Treatment
 
1 To whom correspondence should be addressed; e-mail: gthaker@mprc.umaryland.edu


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