There were a lot of things we didn’t know about schizophrenia in the 1990s, when my mother first entered the mental health care system. We didn’t know that “psychoses have a briefer duration in the Third World,”8 or that people in non-Western countries were ten times more likely to experience “nearly complete remission,”9 or that the “normative treatment for schizophrenia in American culture may significantly make things worse … that it does so by repeatedly creating the conditions for demoralization and despair.”10 We didn’t know that it was possible to recover from schizophrenia in some
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