2025-09-12
23 分钟This is in conversation from Apple News.
I'm Shameez Basu.
Today, can schizophrenia just go away?
When Christine was growing up in the early 2000s, she was extremely close to her mother.
Her mother was someone she found very gentle and compassionate.
That's New Yorker staff writer, Rachel Aviv.
She describes her as this sort of glowing magical figure.
Christine's mother had been a physician in India before getting married,
moving to the US and having Christine and her younger sister Angie.
Christine says she had a pretty typical childhood, until one day, her mother started having serious delusions.
She believed people were conspiring against her, that she was being followed and filmed.
She would accuse Christine of poisoning her food.
She became increasingly unable to care for herself and had to be forcibly hospitalized multiple times.
It felt to Christine like she had lost her mother and she sort of became consumed by getting her back somehow.
Despite Christine's best efforts to find answers, for years, no one could quite explain what was happening to her mother.
She was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, but treatments didn't help.
And for nearly two decades, her condition remained essentially unchanged.
Then, when she was in her fifties, she was diagnosed with cancer and prescribed a medication for it.
And suddenly, her symptoms of psychosis just vanished.
Her psychiatrist, he said like, we never use the word cure in psychiatry,