What is Schizophrenia?

John’s eyes darted from side to side. He was anxious to get to the safety of his office, but he didn’t want anyone to know where he worked.

He’d heard the voices whispering in his ear and seen the eyes staring at him from the bushes and behind walls. They’d been stalking him for a while now.

Even now, he saw curtains twitching as he walked past houses, and people scrambling to their phones to report him to the CIA.

It wasn’t surprising to John.

He was a bright maths graduate from MIT and, during the Cold War, he had worked for the military, decoding secret messages between Soviet Spies.

Obviously, Soviet Russia would still be tracking him 30 years later, while they were hatching their latest plot.

John had tried to warn the US government about what Russia was doing.

He’d emailed them the secret, hidden messages that he’d decoded, which revealed Russian plot.

And he’d told them about the secret messages which the Russians had hidden in pop music on the radio to brainwash people with…

But they just wouldn’t listen!

So instead, he spent his days locked in his office, trying to get away from the piercing stares and ominous voices surrounding him.

The spies thought that John didn’t know about them, but John knew they were there.

Watching him. Waiting.

Back home in their small, suburban home, John’s wife was at her wits’ end. 

John was hardly ever at home and, when he was, he was completely non-cooperative.

He was always talking to himself and saying things that didn’t make sense… circling out ads in newspapers, saying they were secret codes…

She knew John wasn’t well..

There weren’t any people following him and the voices weren’t real…

And the newspapers didn’t actually have secret messages in them…

But what was wrong with John?

Well… John has a mental disorder called schizophrenia!

And to understand what schizophrenia is, we first need to look at its symptoms.