Overcoming Schizophrenia

March 13, 2006 By Pamela Spiro Wagner I could be your daughter or your son, your sister or brother, your mother or father, your friend or your neighbor. I suffer from schizophrenia. For decades, I’ve lived, along with almost three million other people with schizophrenia, in a desolate, dark, little room with a large padlock on the door. The room is stigma, the darkness is fear and the lock is ignorance. I want to speak to you today, having had schizophrenia for decades, to break down the walls of fear and suspicion, unburden you of the myths and mysteries that lead to stigma and get you open that door. I’d like to tell you some reasons why medication compliance is such a difficult issue in schizophrenia and a little about how I began to recover. Medication. What a struggle! I was never going to take medication. Medication meant I was sick. I hated the label, I hated the very idea of a label. But I hated the side effects most. Never mind what medication did FOR me, I hated what it did T...