The first sign of trouble, says Veronica, was when her daughter’s grades started to slip. At 15, Jasmin had been an honor roll student in her San Diego middle school. Suddenly, it was a strain even to sit through class.
“She would come home from school exhausted,” Veronica recalls. “She’d go to a corner in the living room and just sit there, away from everybody.” (Veronica asked us not to use her family’s last name, because Jasmin is still a minor.)
“Up until that point we had wrapping them in wet towels, locking them in a padded cell,” Vinogradov says. “Frontal lobotomies if the behavior was really out of control. I mean, what did we have?
Other studies point to a decline in IQ that happens over the time the disease develops.
In recent years, scientists have begun to talk about schizophrenia as a disease of “salience,” in which the brain loses the ability to tune out information that isn’t useful or relevant.
“In other words, giving antipsychotics to a person with schizophrenia may be like giving painkillers to someone with cancer. It might help, but it’s not getting at the cause.”
Lol.