It is really unfortunate that the society we live in is not acceptable of the people who are specially gifted. It is really difficult to survive in this world if you have one of those dreadful diseases like Schizophrenia or Multi-Personality Disorder. This is really unfortunate considering the fact that these disorders are less because of Genes and more because of the unwanted circumstances a person might have had to face. 

Schizophrenia is a social disorder rather than something that can be cured by drugs and we as a society does not make it easy for people suffering from it. Tanya Marie Luhrmann in her essay describes the change in the way scientists look at the Schizophrenia as “In the 1990s, scientists declared that schizophrenia and other psychiatric illnesses were pure brain disorders that would eventually yield to drugs. Now they are recognizing that social factors are among the causes, and must be part of the cure.”

So how exactly does a person get Schizophrenia? There may be a wide range of things at works here starting with:

1: Genetics

2: Pre-Pregnancy Factors

3: Pregnancy Stress

4: Social and Family Stress

5: Environmental Stress

Out of these only through Genetics and maybe a child’s birth from a particular parent can be counted as something, which the society can do nothing about and that’s also debatable. The rest are social factors, which need to be dealt with at a larger level.

So what made Psychiatrists and Doctors change their view about Schizophrenia being a Genetic Disorder to a Social Disorder. It started with the discovery of the new molecule called clozapine, which was seen as an advent of pharmacological interventions in such conditions. Clozapine had serious side-effects though which have been show here on the National heath services, UK.  The death rates suddenly when through the roof because though the drug dealt with hallucinations the side effects were so severe that it led to a large number of deaths. This is really serious considering all of them were biological side effects rather than psychological side effects and therefore the deaths were not because of suicide. This clearly shows the faulty science at work here in treating with this disorder.

It was further believed that Schizophrenia was a social disease because of the outcomes of the patients being treated in socially more functional places like India. Amy Sousa who spent more than an year in northern India studying the patients suffering from Schizophrenia and their faster development compared to Western patients further undermines the idea that the best way to deal with Schizophrenia is a social disorder and a person has a higher chance of getting better without medication than with medication.