Schizophrenia is a complex disease. The causes aren’t well understood, and experts worry that the lack of understanding contributes to the lack of treatment. But insights from these artistic and intelligent people with schizophrenia can help others understand the human side of living with the condition.
Where to Get More Information, or Help, for Brain Diseases Such as Schizophrenia
The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) are excellent resources for those looking to find treatment and support for schizophrenia in their local area. RELATED: Schizophrenia Awareness Week Is Observed in May As a cofounder of the Beach Boys, Brian Wilson wrote or cowrote more than two dozen Top 40 hits. He has had prolific success as a musician and songwriter despite struggling with mental health issues for several decades. At age 25, he began to experience auditory hallucinations. While he performed onstage, he believed he could hear voices saying negative things about him. In his memoir, I Am Brian Wilson, he writes candidly about his challenges. RELATED: Early Schizophrenia Treatment Programs Multiply Zelda Fitzgerald was an American writer and artist who, along with her husband, the author F. Scott Fitzgerald, became known as a symbol of America’s jazz age in the 1920s. At 30, Zelda Fitzgerald suffered a mental breakdown and was placed in a sanitarium, where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. It was there that she published her first novel, Save Me the Waltz. Her life has inspired numerous books and films. More than 70 years after her death in 1948, the letters that she wrote to her husband while she lived in various institutions were published in Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Elyn R. Saks, author of the New York Times bestseller The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, is often considered one of the first writers to help readers understand what it is like to live with schizophrenia. In the memoir, Saks, an attorney and professor, explains how she was able to overcome some of the obstacles that schizophrenia presented in her life. John Nash Jr., PhD, the Nobel Prize–winning mathematician and subject of the award-winning book and movie A Beautiful Mind, died in an automobile crash in 2015 at the age of 86. In a 2002 interview with Mike Wallace for 60 Minutes, Nash discussed what it was like to experience auditory hallucinations and how he, eventually, dealt with them.
