Word: schizophrenias
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...partner during this phase of development, but nurture plays a vital supportive role. Changes in the environment of the womb--whether caused by maternal malnutrition, drug abuse or a viral infection--can wreck the clockwork precision of the neural assembly line. Some forms of epilepsy, mental retardation, autism and schizophrenia appear to be the results of developmental processes gone awry...
Upon opening October 3rd's Crimson, an article entitled "Sitcom Schizophrenia Seizez HRDC" caught my eye. I read the article carefully, so as not to jump to any conclusions. There is no mention of the mental illness schizophrenia in the article itself, only in the headline. The article dealt with a play about a family some of whose members have imaginary friends...
Imaginary friends are very different from the mental illness schizophrenia. As a mentally ill person I have had to deal with stigma, ignorance and blatant prejudice ever since my diagnosis three years ago. As a mentally ill undergrad at Harvard, I constantly deal with these issues as well and often feel marginalized because there is no peer group on campus, like there are for gender issues or rape or race, to which I can turn for support and understanding...
...development of drugs for schizophrenia, one of the most perplexing and devastating of all mental illnesses, was an early success story. After several decades as a hopeless research backwater, the schizophrenia field was reborn in 1989, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a remarkable drug, clozapine (brand name: Clozaril). Made by the Swiss pharmaceutical firm Sandoz, Clozaril was aimed at patients who did not benefit from other drugs. While traditional antipsychotic drugs such as chlorpromazine (Thorazine) and haloperidol (Haldol) work by blocking dopamine receptors, Clozaril appears to bind to serotonin receptors as well. "It is what we call...
...curing schizophrenia with these new antipsychotics," says Paul. "But we can treat it better. What would happen if we designed a drug that was 10 times better than Clozaril?" Mount Sinai's Davis, on the other hand, thinks future schizophrenia drugs might well be based on altogether different chemical-messenger systems. "There is evidence that schizophrenics have abnormalities in two very common neurotransmitters, gaba [gamma-aminobutyric acid] and glutamate," he says. "None of the current drugs do anything for the most incapacitating symptom of schizophrenia, the cognitive deficits. Maybe it's time to get off the dopamine merry-go-round...