Allie Burke

Health

What It’s Really Like To Live With Schizophrenia

“I haven’t scrawled a bunch of complex mathematical equations on a window lately”

I am one of the 51 million people worldwide living with schizophrenia, diagnosed five years ago when I was 25 years old. Since then, I’ve been wrestling not only with the uncomfortable and often scary effects of the illness itself, but also with the often insensitive way people close to me—and in the culture at large—still view the illness. As of December, the Canadian Mental Health Association ranked schizophrenia as one of the “most stigmatized and misunderstood health issues.” It’s easy, though, to throw around words like “stigma” without appreciating what that means in daily life.

[quote position="left" is_quote="true"]Schizophrenia is loud. It is so, so loud.[/quote]

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