Welcome to Living with Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a severe and disabling illness of the brain that affects the way the mind works often causing disturbed behaviour and disrupting normal living. It will affect about 1 in 100 of the population and starts mainly in late teens and early twenties, at the very time that most people are starting out on their adult life and beginning to realise their plans and ambitions. Today in the UK almost a quarter of a million people are being treated for schizophrenia: it affects men and women alike and cuts across all social classes and ethnic backgrounds.
Schizophrenia is one of the major public health challenges facing us today and yet its true impact is very poorly understood by the general public. The cruelly high death toll from suicide and the higher vulnerability to physical ailments mean that people living with schizophrenia will die 10 to 20 years earlier than average
.
Today in the UK , improved medications coupled with better access to talking therapies have led to better clinical outcomes but social outcomes still lag far behind. At the moment very few people who are diagnosed with schizophrenia will manage to get into work, drive or own their own home despite recovering a large part of their mental functioning. Recovery, true recovery, therefore remains an aspiration that we are yet to achieve
On this website we publish the views and experiences of people who have known schizophrenia from the inside and who do not believe that a diagnosis of schizophrenia need be a life sentence. We believe that the aim should be not simply to survive but to thrive.
