Schizophrenia - Quality of Life

Dr. Sukhi Shergill describes the difficulties encountered by schizophrenic patients in their daily lives.

The quality of life of a schizophrenic patient is generally quite poor. It’s very difficult because sadly we tend to stigmatize psychiatric illness in general that if you ask people who would you like to marry or have a relationship with, people are quite happy to have a relationship or marry someone with a broken leg, or somebody whose hurt their arm. But people are very reluctant to have those kinds of relationship with people with a psychiatric illness. The hard facts are that one in ten people will have some kind of mental illness in their life. One in a hundred will develop a schizophrenic illness. And so it can happen to anybody and one of the things to recognize is it’s just that some people are slightly more resilient to these psychiatric disorders than others. But one should always bear in mind that there, but for the grace of God, go one of us. And we know that we can tip ourselves into psychotic type of illness – schizophrenic type of illness – by abusing cannabis or amphetamines, or simpler ways of doing it. We know that if you have people who have sensory deprivation, you put them in a kind of bubble thing where they can’t feel anything, they start having these kinds of experiences. It’s very difficult for patients with schizophrenia, because of the symptoms they have, to lead normal lives. I think it makes it hard if people also are ignorant about the kind of phenomena or the suffering that patients with schizophrenia go through. It’s very important that people are sympathetic and aware that this is just a feature of the illness and that with appropriate drugs, most people will, can normalize their lives provided they get the right kind of support.