A Woman with Schizophrenia Thrives
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Schizophrenia is generally associated with psychosocial disability and accelerated biological aging. Put another way, persons afflicted with the mental disorder (about 1 percent of the U.S. population) characteristically suffer from psychotic behaviors, like hallucinations, social withdrawal and difficulties with attention, memory and decision making. They also tend to die more than 25 years earlier than the average person, due to disease and unhealthful behaviors.
But there is substantial variability among persons with schizophrenia. Some diagnosed with the disease appear to defy its negative consequences. In a study published in the journal Schizophrenia Research, Dilip Jeste, MD, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Neurosciences and director of the UC San Diego Center for Healthy Aging, and colleagues document the case of a woman in her mid-50s with diagnosed schizophrenia, comparing her with 11 other women with schizophrenia and 11 women with no known psychiatric conditions.
Identified as IP, the woman has lived with chronic schizophrenia since her early 20s, with three psychiatric hospitalizations and numerous other episodes of acute psychotic distress. And yet, IP has successfully completed several post-graduate programs from prestigious institutions, established an ongoing, highly successful academic career, happily married and made many friends and professional relationships.
She’s survived several serious physical illnesses, including three different primary cancers.
IP seems to both typify some of the scourges of schizophrenia and have inexplicably risen above them. On 11 of 14 biomarkers of aging, Jeste and colleagues found her levels to be similar or better than non-psychiatric controls. More astounding, her scores on working memory and other tests of cognitive function and decision capacity exceeded norms.
Wrote the authors: “Although speculative, results suggest a possible model in which superior working memory permits a person to be aware of the potentially psychotic nature of a thought or perception, and adjust response accordingly. Compensatory over-activity of brain regions during affective processing may also reflect heightened meta-awareness in emotional situations. Biomarker levels raise the possibility that IP partially avoided the accelerated biological aging associated with schizophrenia.”
IP may be an outlier, an anomaly, but she also stands as proof that schizophrenia is not a disorder cast in stone. IP’s secrets may help researchers to other revelations.
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