The National Alliance on Mental Illness reports that 85 percent of the people it surveyed know that schizophrenia is an illness. Seventy-nine percent believe treatment can enable people with the disease to live independently. Unfortunately, fewer than one in four know much about the disease. In too many cases, ignorance is replaced by misinformation.

Word Confusion

One of the most common misconceptions is that schizophrenia means having a split personality, that people with the disease simultaneously hold two contradictory viewpoints or have two separate personalities.

This confusion is firmly part of the language. There are two definitions for the word “schizophrenia.” The primary definition refers to the disease. The secondary definition refers to a more general situation in which there are two opposing or contradictory views. Unfortunately, the secondary definition contributes to the misconception of schizophrenia as a disease of split personalities.

Fear of Violence

Another common misconception is promoted by the news and entertainment media who publicize instances of violent acts by people with mental illnesses. Positive nonviolent acts and accomplishments by consumers of mental health care largely are ignored. As a result, people equate mental illness with violence.

Schizophrenia Onscreen

In extreme cases of media ignorance or lack of concern, schizophrenia is equated with serial or spree killers. By contrast, the successful movie A Beautiful Mind was free of much of the misunderstanding and even nonsense that is often presented in depictions of schizophrenia in films and fiction. Some significant details of the main character's illness were not accurately portrayed in the film, but the director and screenwriter did not abuse the subject.

For example, in real life, the protagonist heard voices. He did not have visual hallucinations as the character in the movie did. Also, in real life John Nash was able to discontinue antipsychotic medications after twelve years of illness, while the movie character began taking an atypical antipsychotic later in the film.

Schizophrenia in Literature

Several outstanding novelists have written insightful accounts of characters with believable psychotic illnesses, including schizophrenia and schizophreniform disorder. Some of the symptoms of Nikolai Gogol's character Axenty Ivanovich Poprishchin in the short story “Diary of a Madman” are consistent with schizophrenia. Gogol's novel is a skillful depiction of a person who might be descending into disorganized schizophrenia experiencing a delusion of grandeur.

The nineteenth-century novelist Honoré de Balzac accurately captured many features of schizophrenia in his depiction of the title character in his novel Louis Lambert. Cognitive problems, social withdrawal, a preoccupation with mystical ideas, a lack of interest in communicating, and thought disorder are important elements of Balzac's characterization of his fictional character.

In the twentieth century, one of the best-known literary figures to deal with schizophrenia in both his personal and professional life was F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda, experienced severe psychotic episodes in the early 1930s. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she lived for most of the rest of her life in a sanitarium.

Fitzgerald relied heavily on Zelda's experience of schizophrenia when he wrote Tender Is the Night. This novel explores the effects of the disease on the life of his character Nicole, who experienced acute symptoms at age sixteen.

Schizophrenia in Reality

The majority of people with schizophrenia do not live on the street, they are not confined for years in mental hospitals, and they are not violent. Most people with the disease live with their families, in group homes, or on their own.

Another misconception is that people with schizophrenia are crazy geniuses who alternate between brilliant insights and psychosis. In fact, they are people just like everyone else except they have a condition that can affect their ability to function. To regain enough of that ability, they have to work hard and use the assistance of others to regain skills lost to the disease. If they don't succeed, they can be mentally incapacitated by the disorder.