Ask anyone to imagine a person with schizophrenia and they’ll picture a homeless man wandering the streets yelling at passersby, spittle flying, or a violent Malcom Tate-type, convinced that his niece is possessed by the devil. These are the images that linger in common imaginations. They haunt psyches and distort the experiences of the afflicted. Contrary to popular belief, people with schizophrenia are often not violent. They do hear voices, but with medication, people with schizophrenia can and do live fulfilling, even exceptional lives. Take Lori Schiller (The Quiet Room), deemed a disaster, never to recover—she ends up working in the mental health field. Take Elyn Saks (The Center Cannot Hold), now a law school professor and Esmé Weijun Wang (The Collected), a critically acclaimed creative writer. However, some are not as lucky. Marin Sardy (The Edge of Every Day) describes her brother’s suicide in poignant detail. Ron Powers, author of No One Cares About Crazy People, explains that his son, Kevin, suffered the same fate. In writing this article, I didn’t want to paint the devastation of schizophrenia with a rosy gloss—people with schizophrenia do kill themselves, commit murder, end up homeless—rather, I wanted to give a well-rounded portrait of what the disease can look like. Even in Sardy’s and Powers’ texts, where their loved ones don’t survive their illnesses, the authors describe their relatives as three-dimensional beings: people with kindness, talents, experiences and successes apart from their illnesses, things we forget to think about when we think about people with schizophrenia.
