Schizophrenia: What Is It? Video Transcript

Participants

Joseph Battaglia MD, Nathaniel Lachenmeye , Marty Moss-Coane , Anthony Salerno PhD

Summary

Schizophrenia affects 2.5 million people in the United States alone, but few people know anything about the disease and its symptoms. Listen as our panel dissects fact from fiction and hear author Nathaniel Lachenmeyer share his father's battle with schizophrenia.

Webcast Transcript

MARTY MOSS-COANE: I'm Marty Moss-Coane. Welcome to our webcast. Schizophrenia is a worldwide phenomenon, and in the United States it's estimated that 2.5 million people suffer from schizophrenia -- that's 1% of the population -- but many people know little about what the disease is. It's not, for example, the same as having a split personality, as you may have thought. Today, while myths and stereotypes persist, much more is known about what the disorder is, what the symptoms are, and how the disease progresses. Schizophrenia is the topic for today's webcast, and joining us to bring a very personal perspective to our discussion is Nathaniel Lachenmeyer. His father, Charles Lachenmeyer, was a devoted family man and a professor of sociology before he began his descent into mental illness. When Nathaniel was still young and his father's behavior began to change, his family's marriage fell apart and his father eventually left the family. He was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, convinced that the CIA was trying to control his thoughts and steal his research. He lived for many years alone and homeless. Nathaniel's book about is father is called "The Outsider: A Journey Into My Father's Struggle with Madness." Nathaniel joins us today. Thank you very much.

NATHANIEL LACHENMEYER: Thank you.

MARTY MOSS-COANE: Let me introduce our next guest, Dr. Joseph Battaglia. He is clinical director of the Bronx Psychiatric Center. Nice to have you with us, as well.

NATHANIEL LACHENMEYER: Thank you.

MARTY MOSS-COANE: Dr. Salerno is our third guest. He's the director of rehabilitation services at Rockland Psychiatric Center in New York. Nice to have you with us, as well.

ANTHONY SALERNO, PH.D.: Thank you.

MARTY MOSS-COANE: Let me begin with you, if I can, Nathaniel, to talk a little bit about your father. You were young when he began to lose his grip on reality. What do you remember as a little boy? What do you remember in terms of how your father began to change?

NATHANIEL LACHENMEYER: Prior to onset he had been a very loving and caring parent. As he began to change, the progression was slow and he became slightly hostile and aggressive -- not toward me, but toward other people. It wasn't until after my parents were divorced that it really became schizophrenia, and at that point I would receive calls and letters that were openly delusional and references to the government and a conspiracy that involved my family and things like that.

MARTY MOSS-COANE: You write about how your father began to look different. He had a different face.

NATHANIEL LACHENMEYER: He did early on. I think it was mainly the tension and probably having to negotiate the emerging symptoms and try still to be who he had been. He never recognized the fact that he was ill, so from his perspective he was grappling with an ongoing conspiracy, but even that had a definite physical imprint on him.

MARTY MOSS-COANE: But I got the feeling the way you wrote that he had some kind of awareness that something about him was changing and he was holding on very tight to who he was.

NATHANIEL LACHENMEYER: I think so. I think so. I don't think he ever recognized, though, that it was schizophrenia. I think prior to onset he was aware that he had problems that he was trying to address, in part, in his work as a sociologist. His graduate work, for example, was on schizophrenia, and I make the argument in the book that he did sort of anticipate what would happen. But once the symptoms actually emerged, that insight was lost. He had total lack of insight into the disorder.