At least 600 families in St. Albert face the challenges of a child or parent with schizophrenia. I suspect that they may have felt mistreated by the recent Gazette letter from Dr. Paul Green.
I can only offer assurance that the personal impressions in that letter are not shared by the scientific or clinical community providing schizophrenia services in our region. Few would condone either the sweeping generalizations from anecdotes and media reports or the appeal to an unrelated crime to add shock value to their own punitive opinions.
In the present case, a young man has lost his life. My heart goes out to his family. I appreciate the anger they may feel toward the perpetrator. I am saddened by the flamboyant media coverage that has stimulated the bandwagon imaginations of the Gazette-savvy pundits. I encourage a moment of reflection. This type of commentary can only add to the hardships faced by the families in our neighbourhoods coping with a child or parent suffering from schizophrenia. As most of them already know, schizophrenia is a common disorder (one per cent of the general population) that does not preclude an independent existence and is rarely associated with violent crime.
To contort these facts to service a personal opinion regarding the punishment of one individual (or worse, all disenfranchised people suffering from schizophrenia) brings to mind the muddled logic that resulted in the barbaric Alberta Mental Hygiene Act. There is a new generation of antipsychotic medications, introduced over the past 20 years, that offers stabilization of symptoms, fewer disabling side effects and a small improvement in cognitive skills. Alberta Health Services is supporting in our region a state-of-the art clinic for early diagnosis and intervention. New developments in cognitive behaviour therapy and cognitive rehabilitation therapies for schizophrenia are showing considerable promise. Adherence to treatment has been increased and readmission rates have been lowered.
There is no doubt that schizophrenia is often a disabling mental illness, but there is much more hope for a modicum of normalcy than that described by Green who is not, as his letter may have implied, affiliated with Alberta Hospital Edmonton (AHE), nor is he associated with AHE Neuropsychology or the two off-shoots of this service — the Edmonton Early Psychosis Intervention Clinic (EEPIC) of Alberta Health Services and the Bebensee Schizophrenia Research Unit (BSRU) of the University of Alberta.
In addition to clinical services and research, our members are actively engaged in education programs to correct misinformation about schizophrenia that tends to aggravate the stigma associated with the illness. We make every effort to not fuel misguided fear that compounds the suffering of families trying to cope with this disorder and we are ardent supporters of Alberta Hospital Edmonton because it provides essential clinical and teaching services within an academic research focused setting that strives to improve and never degrade the lives of patients and caregivers in and beyond our community.
Scot E. Purdon, PhD, R. Psych, clinical professor and director of behavioural sciences — University of Alberta, clinical neuropsychologist and clinical co-director of EEPIC, Supervisor — AHE Neuropsychology, Alberta Health Services
