I am a woman with chronic schizophrenia. I have spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals. I could have ended up living most of my life on a back ward, but things turned out quite differently.

One of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that I was ‘gravely disabled.’ To support this view, they wrote in my chart that I was unable to do my Yale Law School homework. I wondered what that meant about much of the rest of New Haven.

The schizophrenic mind is not so much split as shattered. I like to say schizophrenia is like a waking nightmare.

No one would ever say that someone with a broken arm or a broken leg is less than a whole person, but people say that or imply that all the time about people with mental illness

Everyone becomes psychotic in his or her own ways.