Word: schizophrenia
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...scanning ring, these "slices" can be combined to create the illusion of depth. The resulting pictures of bone and soft tissue can help doctors distinguish between patients with a psychiatric disorder and those with head trauma (which can trigger similar symptoms). CTs have been particularly useful in identifying schizophrenia patients. In the 1970s researchers uncovered the first distinguishing abnormality in these patients' brains: the ventricles (fluid-filled open spaces), circled in yellow, are significantly larger in those with the disease, left, than in normal subjects, far left. This provided the first clue that schizophrenics may have less brain tissue affecting...
...Schizophrenia is the most personally destructive and least understood of all the major mental illnesses. Its principal hallmark is extremely disordered thinking--the kind that robs many of its victims of the ability to keep a job, maintain a relationship or even hold a coherent conversation. The first serious symptoms typically begin sometime after puberty, in the late teens or 20s. Some but not all schizophrenics suffer hallucinations. Some but not all schizophrenics hear voices. The cause is undeniably physical--perhaps the unhappy combination of a genetic predisposition and an infection suffered in the womb. In any event...
...this way, schizophrenia affects far more than one person at a time. For a look at its extended impact, TIME visited one family to see how schizophrenia touched its members across four generations and how the family coped with the disease. In some ways, their story is uncommon--most schizophrenics don't have a family history of the disorder. In other ways, particularly in their struggle to deal with the stigma and isolation of a mental illness, the Beales of Howard, Ohio, are all too typical...
...Beale, 65, never knew his mother, Emma, a vivacious former schoolteacher with a knack for picking up foreign languages. When she was 30 and Ed was just 7 months old, she was committed to a psychiatric institution with what the family later recognized as schizophrenia. When Ed was 3, his dad told him that his mother had died soon after giving birth to him. Although she actually lived until 1973--when Ed was 36--he never met her, heard her voice or kissed her cheek...
...specter of schizophrenia returned with their third child, Peter. A happy, precocious youngster who learned to read in kindergarten, Peter focused less and less on school as he got older. It wasn't until after he joined the Air Force in 1985, however, that his life truly began to deteriorate. Peter remembers sitting next to another student in a training class and telling him about what seemed to him to be a wondrous, novel idea. "But then he just looked at me funny," Peter recalls. "He says to me, 'You aren't saying anything. You're just making noises...