Is schizophrenia a lifelong thing? I've recently been diagnosed but I've been dealing with symptoms for a few years. I've heard that people can manage their symptoms but is it possible to fully recover?
Hello there anon!
Well, it actually depends a little bit on who you ask! My answer is “not necessarily”. The thing is... The thing we know as “schizophrenia” is most likely not one disease with a common cause and course. Rather, it is a category that we put a lot of differing experiences in.
Some people become completely symptom-free, some people go back and forth, some people are low-key or high-key psychotic for life...
If you ask a psychiatrist, they will often say that it’s impossible to be “cured”, and it’s more or less impossible to have the diagnosis removed, and instead they give you a diagnosis of “schizophrenia in remission”. This follows a kind of outdated idea that schizophrenia is necessarily a degenerative, chronic disorder.
The chances of becoming completely symptom-free are higher if you experience mostly positive symptoms, but this just statistical fact and doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to get better if you have a lot of other types of symptoms.
So yeah - Some people do reach a point where they are symptomfree without meds. A somewhat famous example in the northern hemisphere is Arnhild Lauveng who wrote several books about her life as an ex-schizophrenic, now clinical psychologist. Her first book is called “A road back from schizophrenia” in English, and I have no idea if it’s a good translation as I read it in the original language, but I found the book very worthwhile. One of very few books to keep my attention in a long time.
Lauveng was one of the people who was very severely disturbed and disabled for many years, and her story brought me a lot of hope, even though I personally don’t expect to ever recover fully.
Cat
