By Araba Chintoh, Psychiatry Resident
Mental Health is Health – that’s the conversation I have with people day in and day out. It’s the message I share with patients in our schizophrenia inpatient units, with those who visit the emergency department, and with their families. It’s the advocacy role I’ve taken on. It’s the drum I beat right from when I first meet patients and their families.
That’s because there is too often a prevailing sense that whatever brings a person to CAMH – schizophrenia, psychosis, anxiety or depression – the patient is somehow at fault. That they did it to themselves. Some – but not all – families don’t get it. They wish their loved one would just stop behaving the way they are behaving.
Just stop.
In the emergency department it’s particularly hard. People are very sick, and families are at their wit’s end. They’re in crisis. We have better success on the inpatient ward because we’re able to develop a bit of a relationship with the families, but the similarities between schizophrenia and physical illnesses can still be difficult to appreciate.
Schizophrenia is the same as diabetes, cancer or heart disease, I tell them. People don’t bring psychosis on themselves any more than people are to blame for other illnesses. They do not want to have psychosis. They didn’t choose schizophrenia any more than someone else chooses cancer. They’re not trying to make their family angry, and they’re not being lazy. They are sick.
Crohn’s disease is chronic with a fluctuating course – just like schizophrenia – but people with Crohn’s don’t get ditched and abandoned. Families of people with Crohn’s do not get fed up with their loved ones. There are resources, multidisciplinary teams, and friends to help them.
Not so with schizophrenia. Our patients – especially the one-third with a treatment-resistant form of the illness – fall through the cracks. Some families give up on trying to help them. The truth is that our schizophrenia patients are in the same difficult situation that cancer patients were in 30 years ago, the same as people with HIV. Looking at how far research into those illnesses has come and how much treatments have improved shows me there’s hope for my patients.
Schizophrenia, and other severe and persistent mental illnesses, needs the same devotion of resources that turned the tables for cancer and HIV. There was a time when a diagnosis of cancer or HIV was an automatic death sentence, but we’ve learned so much through research. Attitudes have changed, and the world has gotten behind creating a better future for people with these illnesses.
With schizophrenia, we’re just not there yet, but I have hope.
How do we get there? By always – in our conversations, our interactions and our actions – moving toward an understanding that Mental Health is Health. Mental illnesses are the same as physical ones. For me, that starts with my patients and their families. It can be difficult sometimes for families to understand that, but I hope it resonates because the best chance patients have of getting through this, especially those such a complex mental illness as schizophrenia, is by having family by their side who refuse to give up on them.