What is it like to find out that you have schizophrenia? How do others begin to react to you and doctors? What restrictions does this impose on your life? Why do Russian doctors mainly not know how to work correctly with this diagnosis? How are repressions against Soviet dissidents associated with modern patients with schizophrenia? And what is it like to try to adapt to reality and cope with your own disease? About all this - in the story told by the reporter Irina Shcherbakova.

Voices in the head, loss of connection with reality, alienation and loneliness - this is how schizophrenia manifests itself. In the last century, the diagnosis sounded like a sentence, and in Japan, one of the most developed countries of the twentieth century, patients underwent forced sterilization. Today, with such a diagnosis, you can return to a normal life, albeit with the support of medicines.

There are more than 20 million people with schizophrenia in the world. Only 15 % of them, after making a diagnosis, completely return to their former life: get rid of symptoms, retain cognitive functions, work, family and friendship. It is proved that schizophrenia reduces the chances of parenthood and marriage and increases the risk of divorces. But people with such a diagnosis need close relationships no less than everyone else.