Observing Schizophrenia In America

It has been four years, getting to know this disease and what it does to a person. Four years dealing with a health care system that is a continually changing maze that baffles a sane person and is impossible, for someone experiencing an altered sense of reality, to navigate.

This experience has heightened my alarm for the "ones who fall through the cracks". The number of times my son would have been lost without our assistance is frightening. Even with our well intentioned attempts to help him, we are always encountering situations that are confusing, and for a schizophrenic, would defeat any attempts to deal with or resolve them. When I say lost, I mean it figuratively and literally.

I would venture a guess that the majority of schizophrenics are either in jail, self medicating with drugs and alcohol, living on the streets, a combination of the above, or dead. There are also the "lucky" ones that have found a medication that allows them to manage their own lives, or have family that cares for them.

Most Psychiatrists will not participate in the government sponsored health care programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and the various State programs. Among the doctors who do, "Tag the Loony and Collect a Check" is a popular game. Most of them have an overload of patients, so their main function is to write prescriptions. The image of a Psychiatrist taking fifty minutes to listen to a patient, is outdated, and in our experience nonexistent. Psychiatric drugs have improved over the years, and doctors also realized that you can't talk a schizophrenic back to sanity. Still the drugs aren't a cure, and only offer varying degrees of sanity; leaving the patient only partially able to cope with their delusions, and mostly unable to survive on their own.