MIND FIELD

A film’s success could help bring down the walls of ignorance surrounding schizophrenia

PARIS - Mental health groups are jubilant at the success of A Beautiful Mind, hoping the Oscar-nominated blockbuster will smash down the walls of ignorance and taboo surrounding schizophrenia.

     Hollywood favors sunny, happy endings and so only rarely makes a foray into the grim, grey area of human experience that is mental illness. A Beautiful Mind is an exception. The hope is it will do for schizophrenia what the Dustin Hoffman movie Rain Man did for autism.

     “We believe the film’s having an enormous effect,” said Paul Corry of the National Schizophrenia Fellowship, a British charity which has set up a special website and distributed 350,000 postcards to promote schizophrenia awareness on the back of the movie’s success.

     “The film first of all overturns most public stereotypes about people with schizophrenia being failures,” he said. “Secondly, it makes the very valid point that schizophrenia isn’t a death sentence. Many thousands of people do recover a meaningful and fulfilling life from the illness.”

     Sufferers have to fight a daily battle of social exclusion as well as an incurable, although possibly controllable, disease. Indeed, it is not unknown for doctors to give a diagnosis with a less frightening name in order to soften the blow for a family.

     The reason: Many people mistakenly think that schizophrenia involves having a split personality and often associate the condition with violence.

     In fact, it entails suffering delusions or noises that distort reality and sow paranoia in the mind of the patient, prompting them to behave, as seen from the outside, irrationally, weirdly or even frighteningly.

     But acts of violence by diagnosed schizophrenics are rare, and are minute when compared with those committed by young men high on drink or drugs, says Corry.

     Even if A Beautiful Mind helps the public to become a little more accepting of schizophrenia, there is still a long haul before this disease is conquered.

     “We are beginning to understand schizophrenia more as a number of different illnesses rather than a single illness,” said Charlotte Feinmann, a London psychiatrist who treats schizophrenics. “The breakthroughs have been on the genetic side and the understanding of brain function, but also there’s been a lot more work done on how you work with families of schizophrenics, using cognitive therapy as well as drug therapy to control the delusions.”

     Scientists suspect there could be several causes for schizophrenia, including genes that disrupt or cause an imbalance in neurotransmitters, chemicals that send and receive signals among brain cells. The chief suspects lie on Chromosome 22 of the human genome. They are the genes PRODH2, which controls an important brain enzyme, and DGCR6, which appears to play a role in the early development of the nervous system.

     Mutations in these genes may trigger early-onset schizophrenia, a type that appears before adolescence, while another gene, WKL1, may cause a rarer but more acute form called catatonic schizophrenia.

     There are also environmental factors. A family row or a breakup with a girlfriend or boyfriend can mark the onset of schizophrenia but exactly how these events trigger such a destructive molecular cascade is one of many unresolved questions.