Schizophrenia

R.D. Laing's views of schizophrenia (as presented in Darrell Sifford's Dec. 7 article) do a great disservice to persons with schizophrenia and their families. Schizophrenia is not an escape from a threat to personal reality. It is a brain disease, like Alzheimer's disease. To suggest that simple kindness and understanding cures the disease is not only ridiculous, it is cruel and promotes stigma against the victims of the disease and their families. Dr. Laing clearly has not lived with a person who has schizophrenia, as members of the Alliance for the Mentally Ill have, or he would know that even severely ill persons have their lucid moments and that neuroleptic medications really work.

Searching for the genes that cause schizophrenia is like looking for a light switch in a dark theater. Make that several switches - and all in different places. Yesterday, a New Jersey researcher announced that her team had narrowed the search for one gene to a small part of the human DNA code. The team expects to hit it by year's end. What could happen then is unclear: If the switch turns out to be a master switch, scientists could then try to devise ways to keep the gene from making people sick - an effort that could take a decade.

Although the two young men were identical twins, there was something unusual about Malcolm Lee, something that set him apart from his brother Michael as the two waited in the clinical research center at the University of Pennsylvania. Michael, 26, an attractive man with neatly cut hair, sat quietly in the center's lounge and answered the questions put to him by the psychologist with interest and insight. Malcolm, whose hair had been hacked at with a razor, wandered up and down the hall outside the lounge, and his answers to questions were curt and strangely devoid of emotional tone.

It has been scorned, feared and misunderstood as a stain on the soul. As a judgment. Or as something awful that happens to a child when parents don't know what they're doing. But schizophrenia increasingly is being seen as an illness - a stroke of biology that should occasion no more blame or shame than having a defective kidney. And that distinction, say experts who gathered in Philadelphia over the last two days, is helping speed research into the causes of the crippling mental illness that afflicts 1 percent of the population.

What doctors think of as schizophrenia may in fact be more than one disease causing similar symptoms, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania believe. People diagnosed with the severe mental illness have different types of memory deficits and different abnormalities in the structure of their brains, according to a study published today in the journal Neuropsychology. The hallmark of schizophrenia is psychotic symptoms, such as loss of contact with reality, delusions and hallucinations.

POLICE are searching for a Bensalem man missing more than five weeks. Marcian Newman, 35, who resides with his parents on Arrowood Drive, was wearing dark clothes and a hat when he left the house on the night of Jan. 27, said his stepfather, Dual Yordy. Although Newman has been diagnosed as having schizophrenia, Yordy said, he had been doing well. "We don't understand - everything seemed fine," said Yordy. "He's schizophrenic, but he's been having real good results. . . . He was bragging about how great everything was, then all the sudden, bam!

Tom Harrell is one of the world's best jazz trumpet players, a man with an encyclopedic knowledge of music, admired for his ability to improvise in a cerebral but emotionally affecting way. He has just released his 19th CD, Live at the Village Vanguard, and is on the verge of celebrating his 10th wedding anniversary. He also has schizophrenia, one of the most debilitating mental illnesses. That's how he came to be playing at Zanzibar Blue the other day before an audience of psychiatrists and psychiatric researchers in town for the American Psychiatric Association convention.

Dr. Clancy D. McKenzie operates a psychiatric consultation service in Bala Cynwyd and concedes that he has more professional adversaries than supporters. He believes that while most people in his field are downstream looking for the leak in the dam, he's a maverick approaching the problem - and finding solutions - by working from the opposite direction. "People often ask who I'm with. I'm with myself, free to view the world from something other than the point of view of a group.

At age 13, Sam Harris didn't know why he heard voices and saw creatures no one else saw. He only knew he had to stay quiet. To speak up was to be called "crazy" and "retard. " After he was driven from home at age 15, he lived on the streets for three years until the night he could no longer stand the noises. "I was sleeping in a basement and I saw myself covered in rats. Mentally I felt like I had turned into a rat," Harris said. "I no longer cared about people's perception of me. I was tired of being in a living hell.

POLICE are searching for a Bensalem man missing more than five weeks. Marcian Newman, 35, who resides with his parents on Arrowood Drive, was wearing dark clothes and a hat when he left the house on the night of Jan. 27, said his stepfather, Dual Yordy. Although Newman has been diagnosed as having schizophrenia, Yordy said, he had been doing well. "We don't understand - everything seemed fine," said Yordy. "He's schizophrenic, but he's been having real good results. . . . He was bragging about how great everything was, then all the sudden, bam!

I WISH JACK WELCH, the former CEO of General Electric, had consulted with business leaders before claiming the White House cooked the books on the September unemployment rate ("Not all employment created equal," editorial, Oct. 9). By his own admission, Welch has publicly admitted he did not speak with anyone between the time the Labor Department released its report at 8:30 a.m. on Friday, and five minutes later when he lit up the Twitter world with his unfounded accusation. I don't remember Welch, a loyal Republican supporter, ever questioning the monthly rate during the last four years.

What to make of this week's dueling economic headlines? Somehow, Philadelphia is growing both more impoverished and more competitive. The Pew Philadelphia Research Initiative is out with a new study revealing that the suburbs, not the city, have raised residential taxes most rapidly over the last decade. Philadelphia hasn't achieved tax parity - not by a long shot - but the Pew report suggests strongly the city is moving in the right direction. Encouraging. And yet The Inquirer's Alfred Lubrano reports that Philadelphia's poverty rate jumped 6.4 percent in a year, solidifying Philadelphia's status as one of the nation's poorest big cities.

People with schizophrenia, the mental illness that afflicted a woman who allegedly killed two Canadian tourists in Atlantic City on Monday, are generally not violent, experts say, but the risk that they will be rises when they stop taking medications and start taking illicit drugs. A history of violent behavior and exposure to violence as a child are also red flags. It is difficult to get people with any chronic mental illness to take their medicines properly, psychiatrists pointed out, but it can be especially challenging with people whose brains are so dysfunctional that they may not realize they are sick.

ATLANTIC CITY - Two sets of visitors to this seaside casino resort often mingle in the streets behind the glitter of the Boardwalk - tourists and homeless people from across the region - and something went dreadfully wrong in that uneasy mix Monday when a woman described as homeless and deranged plunged a 12-inch butcher knife into two tourists from Canada, killing both. Antoinette E. Pelzer, 44, who holds a Philadelphia driver's license but who a relative said had been homeless for five months and undergone treatment for schizophrenia, made a first appearance Tuesday afternoon in state Superior Court in Atlantic County.

For the eminent psychiatrist Aaron Beck, figuring out how to use talk therapy to help people with schizophrenia has been a passion and also a challenge far greater than "working out the structure of depression," the achievement that first brought him fame. Beck, a University of Pennsylvania professor emeritus who is considered a founder of cognitive behavior therapy, has spent years trying to puzzle out why it can be so maddeningly hard to motivate people with schizophrenia and to change their behavior.

With his 46-year-old schizophrenic son in jail, Sam Ruggieri wasn't thrilled about the lack of psychiatric care available behind bars. But he couldn't help looking at recent headlines involving mental illness and wondering about the alternative. In March, a 23-year-old Upper Merion man fatally stabbed his parents and twin brother after years of struggling with what relatives had decided was schizophrenia. Then, last month, a Hatfield police lieutenant shot and killed his 17-year-old son while fending off an attack from the teen a day after a mental-health clinic had released him. "How can you not hear stories like that and think about your own situation?"

A judge ordered a second round of psychiatric evaluation Tuesday for an Upper Merion man charged in the slayings of three family members. Joseph McAndrew Jr., 23, has been held at Norristown State Hospital since investigators accused him of killing his mother, father and twin brother James with an 18-inch samurai-style sword. Their bodies were found March 5 in a bloody crime scene at their Gulph Mills home. But within days of his arrest, doctors declared McAndrew unfit to proceed with a preliminary hearing.

Even as James McAndrew tried to understand his twin brother's mental-health issues, Joseph McAndrew Jr. was growing increasingly paranoid about James, according to court documents. Joseph McAndrew was worried that tech-savvy James had hacked into his computer, so much so that Joseph did not subscribe to the same Internet provider as the rest of his family. Joseph was also despondent over a recent breakup of an online relationship that he had been conducting with a girl from Argentina, according to the documents.

Tonight, in a kind of public therapy session, two giants will sit across from each other and talk intimately about something most people try to hide: Mental illness. One is John F. Nash Jr., the brilliant mathematician and Nobel Prize winner whose battle with schizophrenia was the subject of the 2001 movie A Beautiful Mind, starring Russell Crowe. The other is Aaron T. Beck, one of the world's foremost psychotherapists and the originator of cognitive therapy, a practical treatment that focuses on changing distorted or inaccurate beliefs.