Some Resources

Family Support

Family members need education and support as much as people with the illness do, albeit of a different kind. Family members are the people who know the sufferer the best, and they are the ones who care the most. Family members are part of the treatment team, and a very important component of that team. I recommend any local family member organization: in the U.S. your local  National Alliance for the Mentally Ill   affiliate  (Find your US state and nearest NAMI affiliate) , and in Canada your local  Schizophrenia Society  chapter. In England it is the  National Schizophrenia Fellowship.  I know that many other countries have family member support organizations. The following site has list of such groups  Around the World   In such a group you will be talking with people who have lived through the same kinds of situations that you are dealing with, and you can learn what works and what doesn't, how medical resources can be best utilized, and the most effective support resources in your district. I have been fairly independent of my family. I do know that family education is second only to medication in preventing relapse, and I recommend multi family education programs which are becoming more common, to achieve that success.

Early Intervention Resources

There have been some recent web sites promoting resources to teachers, family and students about mental health and students that are definitely worth taking a look at. They often have videos, teaching manuals, and information sheets that can be ordered or downloaded. These sorts of resources didn't exist even five years ago, and as such these sites are unique. I'm hoping to order most of the material for the high school region in which I make presentations, usually to Grade 11 health classes.

Movies

If you are a movie fan there are a fair number of Hollywood films about schizophrenia, some quite compassionate, available in most video stores.

"Spider" is a rather sad film that is directed by David Cronenberg, who tends to be dark and moody. "Spider", is released from psychiatric custody where he has been a schizophrenic patient for twenty years. He takes up residence at a halfway house in a bleak, run-down section of East End London, the same neighborhood where he grew up. As the story unfolds Spider has a lot of flashbacks about his mother and father. It's a good film and well acted but it's not something Hollywood would ever release. It reminded me of the European films I saw as a teenager, Igmar Bergman, Bertolucci, and several others I've now forgotten.

"A Beautiful Mind" won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay in the 2002 Oscars and I highly recommend it. You experience schizophrenia through John Nash. Hollywood has a hard time shooting delusions and hallucinations. They show ordinary actors as hallucinations, and I've never met anyone with schizophrenia who experienced visual hallucinations of people in such exact detail. At the same time, just because the voices are invisible doesn't mean they aren't as real as real people. You relate to them as if they are real, and this movie conveys that very well. This movie is a very powerful movie and having won best picture, it will raise awareness of schizophrenia as a tragic illness that can have a happy ending. Ron Howard, the director apparently witnessed someone developing psychosis during the shooting of another film and was interested in making a film of John Nash because of that experience.

"Through a Glass Darkly" also won an Academy award, "Best Foreign film", back in the seventies, very early for any film to mention schizophrenia by name. It is an Igmar Bergman film shot in black and white, a bit stark really about a young woman and some pretty strange family dynamics.

"Dare to Love" is about a beautiful young woman who has a remarkable recovery with Clozapine, a little too remarkable maybe. It's hard to find this one in the video store although it plays on tv every once in awhile.

"Angel Baby" is a relatively recent Australian film about a couple who both have schizophrenia. It's a very sad and brutally honest film. It was a little too realistic for comfort to me, reminding me a lot of my experiences.

"Benny and Joon" is a much happier film, again about romance, independence and schizophrenia.

"The Saint of Fort Washington" is another sad one about homelessness and schizophrenia. "Benny and Joon" and "The Saint of Fort Washington" were my personal favorites before I saw "A Beautiful Mind".

"The Gingerbread Man" has a central character with schizophrenia but his role is to illustrate our fear of people with schizophrenia.

"The Fight Club" is a quite violent but ostensibly about schizophrenia. You don't learn that the hero has schizophrenia until quite late in the film, since you see the world through his eyes, but then at the end you're not sure what is real and what isn't. His visual hallucinations convey the experience of schizophrenia, through his experience of them. Your delusions are very concrete in the sense that you have no doubt they are real.

"Donnie Darko" was recommended by several of my visitors. It's a film about adolescents, and the main character is being treated with medication for a mental illness. This film is like "Fight Club" in that you're never too sure what is real and what are delusions. And in the same way the ending is inconclusive because you're not sure if what you're seeing is real or just what Donnie believes is real.

"Pi" is slow movie to watch, as the main character gets deeply involved in Jewish mysticism, and computers. Whether he actually has a computer or not is really unknown. Like the last two it's difficult to tell what is real and what is the distorted reality of psychosis. This film is a little more intense than the "Donnie Darko" and "The Fight Club" because the main character is very isolated socially. He does end up in a psychiatric hospital by the end of the film, which is what I would guess would happen in the Fight Club and Donnie Darko if they are simply very delusional at the end.

I'm not sure but I would guess that the main character in "Shine" has schizo affective disorder. David certainly had an emotionally abusive father according to the movie. The movie is actually based on the real life of a gifted pianist in Australia, who became unable to play in music school, living many years in a psychiatric hospital until various people invite him into their homes. It's actually a very compelling story about how therapeutic community support can be. The director of the film read a short article in the newspaper about how a highly acclaimed musician who had disappeared was starting to play again at a restaurant in town.

"Don Juan de Marcos" is about a man mistaken to have schizophrenia, whose reality was somewhat similar to some of my grandiose delusions.

"Whale Music" is a Canadian film about a musician who probably has schizophrenia, but they mistakenly blame the cause on his brother's suicide.

It's very hard to capture the experience of a psychosis on film because it is mostly internal. My experience of delusions were somewhat like the story of the heroine in "Terminator", powerful enemies, nobody realizing the truth you have learned, and the fate of humanity resting on your shoulders. In "Terminator 2" I wasn't surprised she was hospitalized for schizophrenia, and she escapes to save the world yet again. The Bruce Willis film "12 Monkeys" reminded me of my experience of schizophrenia as well, although it is about another time traveller. I find the "The Matrix" Series fascinating, because of the premise that the world we see is a essentially a delusion, and reality is actually very different. I've seen them several times.

One of my visitors recommended "The Messenger" which is about Joan of Arc. I haven't seen it yet but I think she would probably have had bipolar disorder simply because she has become famous. There are probably quite a few saints who either had a form of epilepsy or bipolar disorder that didn't disable them as much as schizophrenia would have. John Nash is famous and he definitely had schizophrenia but he accomplished his Nobel Prize award winning work before he experienced his first psychosis. For the next thirty years or so he wasn't able to do very much at all. That is what often distinguishes schizophrenia from bipolar, the sheer disability associated with schizophrenia.

"What About Bob" is definitely not about schizophrenia but everyone I know with schizophrenia loved that movie and several have bought it and watch it regularly. There have been several very popular movies on mental illness since Hollywood started producing films, such as "The Snake Pit", "The Three Faces of Eve", "Psycho", "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", "Silence of the Lambs", and recently "As Good as it Gets", all award winning movies, but not necessarily very accurate portrayals of mental illness. I liked "The Dream Team" which is quite entertaining.

"Me, Myself and Irene" had some of the most stigmatizing advertising I've ever seen, but it was a comedy that actually had considerable compassion for the hero. When he took his medication he improved and when he didn't, he hurt himself more than anybody else. The trouble is that the writers thoroughly confused multiple personality disorder with schizophrenia, but it was an entertaining movie and I guess that is all they wanted.

"The Cell" was by far the worst I've ever seen, big on special effects but the man with schizophrenia is a psychopathic killer, one that falls into a coma so the heroine must enter his mind using some experimental technology. It would have been a typical Hollywood horror film if they hadn't specifically identified the very evil psychopath as having schizophrenia. You have to wonder about the ethics of the ending too, where it becomes OK for a woman to kill a man because she thinks he wants to die.

The World Wide Web

In the last year some new resources have come on line. My links page is a good start. The Schizophrenia Home page has links for students, links for family members, links for professionals, etc. I think the article by Dr. Green Review of schizophrenia is an interesting introduction to the very complex topic of schizophrenia. The Treatment Advocacy Center is among the best and most thorough. I use a program called Copernic to use a dozen search engines at once, which I would recommend Copernic.

Books

There are many journals online now and many articles on schizophrenia. The Schizophrenia Bulletin comes highly recommended. A few issues are online at Schizophrenia Bulletin. I learn mostly through conferences and dinner presentations, where the speakers usually use slides to illustrate their points. I think it is the easiest way to learn new things.

The following is based on a reading list given to local chapter presidents of the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario. I can't read very much, one of the losses I've had to adjust to with schizophrenia. I've read the ones in green. I particularly liked "Conquering Schizophrenia" and "Beyond Crazy", but maybe because both are quite easy to read. A publisher sent me "The Outsider" to read and I gave it to my friend who is a social worker, who said it was excellent. Several people have recommended "This Much I know is True" which is fiction. There are more and more books coming out every year and this is only a partial list.

Index page
Recommended links

What is schizophrenia? | | My story | | Condensed story | | Recovery | | Prodrome | | Medication | | Compliance Early Intervention | | Relapse prevention | | Cognition | | Housing and benefits | | Meaningful activity | | Family and social support | | ACT Teams | | Movies, books | | Web sites | | Poster | | Origins of this site | | Persistent delusions | | Photo of me | | My addictions | | First graph | | Guest book 2004 | |