Getting Your Life Back Together When You Have Schizophrenia

by Roberta Temes

Despite recent advances in medicine and psychology, schizophrenia remains a complex and challenging disease. In this practical manual, Roberta Temes explains what the disease is, describes treatment options and resources, and presents an innovative 'collaborative cure' that brings together a support team to help the person with schizophrenia lead a fuller life.

Genres: Mental Health, Psychology

140 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Fishface · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book pissed me off immediately by announcing on the first page that the reader has an organic brain disease. That may be true, but has yet to be proven. The first half of the book is packed with all kinds of misleading information, implying for instance that a doctor will do a CT or PET scan on you to see if you have schizophrenia (!) and that if you're too scrambled to manage buying your prescriptions, the pharmacist will bring it out to you personally (!!). On the bright side, she does make every effort to make clear that Schizophrenia is not the sufferer's fault and is not the product of "schizophrenogenic parenting." But some of this disinformation is a serious downer for the reader. She implies more than once, for instance, that if you have Schizophrenia, you will be hospitalized sooner or later, probably quite a lot -- also not true -- and that there is no relationship between stress and symptoms, which is laughable. I think this kind of wrong information is not at all helpful to someone who is already struggling to think straight. The second half of the book is another story; it's full of helpful strategies for someone with a psychotic disorder who's seriously disorganized and low-functioning. To people with less severe symptoms this is not going to be helpful at all. She could have benefited by providing other strategies geared to higher-functioning and better-educated sufferers capable of doing some decent self-monitoring and generally becoming more empowered healthcare consumers. Overall, though, it is too flawed to be helpful -- I would not recommend this book to ANYONE.