Schizophrenia is a chronic disabling mental illness that affects men and women equally and although it is treatable, it is not curable. Schizophrenia is a disease that causes people to withdraw from the real world and activities they once loved only to enter their world of delusion and fantasy. It is one of the most common mental disorders in the United States, affecting roughly 2.2 million Americans. The most widely used treatment for this illness is medication and as long as the person stricken with this illness takes the prescribed medication, they can lead semi normal lives.
             Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that impairs the person's "perception of reality" (Klag 1254). Schizophrenia is not a split-personality disorder as psychiatrists once thought, but the split occurs between the mind and reality (Siegfried 2). There is no one known cause of this disorder, but there are many different opinions about the possible causes. Early theories suggested it was caused by stress, but more recently it is thought to be due to a biochemical abnormality (Deth 1).
             Furthermore, some researchers have explored fetal growth for the cause of schizophrenia. It is thought that schizophrenia appears as early as the 2nd trimester of pregnancy when there is a disturbance in the growth process of the brain, which causes miswiring of receptors in the brain (Siegfried 3). Another cause could be prenatal trauma, or if the mother had a viral infection that could cause the brain to have abnormalities ("Secrets Of Schizophrenia" 12). There are other abnormalities in schizophrenia patients. For example, the thalamus gland, which sends signals to and from parts of the brain, is smaller than seen in people with out schizophrenia (Siegfried 3).
             Equally important, biochemists say that it might be a neurochemical imbalance that deals with the neurotransmitters of the brain. The neurotra...