FICTION: Emotional problems are part of the human experience. Seeking help when problems become hard to deal with is a sign of strength and common sense. No one should have to €œgo it alone.€

• 1 in 4 people will experience mental illness in any given year.¹
• For example, if someone suffering from a mental illness is sitting in a college classroom of 200 students, that means 49 of his/her classmates can relate. And many of the other 150 people would likely feel sympathetic too, as they probably have friends or loved ones in their lives who also have also experienced mental illness.

FACT: Many healthy people experience some unusual perceptions at some point in their lives, so it’s not something restricted to mental illness.

• Studies show that anywhere from 8% to 25% of the general population can experience some form of hallucination(s) in their lifetime.²
• Studies also show that 5% to 70% of people can have delusional ideas. ²

Although these experiences are not uncommon in a lifetime, it is important to seek help when these disturbances occur frequently, cause you great stress, and interfere with your daily functioning or wellbeing.

There is a certain threshold of severity that determines if these experiences have developed into an illness or indicate risk for an illness. Only a trained clinician can accurately diagnose and help treat these.

FICTION: Current studies show that on average, only approximately 29% of those considered €œat risk for psychosis€ actually go on to develop psychosis.³

• Research is still working on ways to prevent psychosis, but many professionals hope that even just knowing that you are at risk could help prevent the development of psychosis.
• Studies performed with at-risk subjects in many different types of clinical treatment, medicated or not, show decreased rates of transitions to psychosis.³

FACT: Psychotic disorders are rapidly becoming more and more treatable as new therapies reach the public. Knowing what treatments to look for might be the first step.

• There are a number of well-established and effective treatments for people with psychosis disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, severe forms of major depression.
  
• The latest mental health research is blossoming with new ways of treating the array of problems people with psychosis face, meaning not just hallucinations or delusions, but also difficulties in thinking, stress management, social obstacles, and medication side effects.^{4, 9}
  
  Click here for a list of empirically supported treatment options from the American Psychological Association (APA).

FICTION: Psychotic symptoms can occur in the context of a number of medical and mental disorders of which schizophrenia is only one.

• Hallucinations, delusions, and other difficulties with reality-testing may be features of a number of disorders, such as:
  • Bipolar Disorder
  • Depression with psychotic features
  • Schizoaffective Disorder
  • Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
  • Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder¹⁰
    
• Amphetamines, cannabis, cocaine, LSD, opiates, and many other drugs have also been associated with €œsubstance-induced psychosis. They may also trigger the onset of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.¹¹
  
• There are possible organic causes of psychotic symptoms¹¹ that may require medical screenings with a primary care physician or a neurologist:
  • Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE)
  • Malaria
  • Syphilis
  • Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)
  • Many others

FICTION: Schizophrenia is NOT characterized by major personality/identity changes, but primarily by hallucinations and/or delusions.¹⁰

• A hallucination is seeing, hearing, feeling, or smelling something that is not real. A delusion is deeply held belief that cannot be proven true to reality.
  
• People with schizophrenia also often experience other difficulties, such as problems with attention, memory, and/or social interest.

FICTION: Mass media over-reports and over-portrays violence by people with mental illness in news¹² and entertainment¹³. The vast majority of violent acts in America are committed by mentally “healthy” people.

• Although some studies report a slightly higher risk for violence in some disorders, recent meta-analyses show that this increased risk is overwhelmingly accounted for by drug abuse.¹⁴
  
• In other words, mental illness alone rarely makes a person more violent, but drug abuse often does. To put this in perspective, a similar increase of risk for violence is also seen in healthy people who abuse drugs.
  
• Writer Vaughan Bell made an interesting comparison in his Slate article, “Crazy Talk” (a title intended to satirize the stigmatizing usage of the word crazy). You are three times more likely to be killed by a lightening strike, already an extremely rare event, than by a random stranger with schizophrenia.¹⁵
  
• Perhaps more worrisome is the fact that people with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.¹⁴ When mass media tends to portray the opposite of this reality, it represents an unfortunate, stigmatizing misunderstanding of mental illness that hurts more than it helps.

FACT: Although it might be easy to think of mental illness as a result of personality or genetic makeup alone, research points to a combination of social, environmental, genetic, and biophysiological risk factors that few of us would have any say in being exposed to.^16€“21

• There are a host of genes known to contribute to risk, but no single factor guarantees the development of mental illness.^22,23