About this item
When bright lives are derailed by schizophrenia, bewildered and anxious families struggle to help, and to cope, even as scientists search for causes and treatments that prove elusive. Painful and often misunderstood, schizophrenia profoundly affects people who have the disease and their loved ones. Here Ronald Chase, an accomplished biologist, sets out to discover the facts about the disease and better understand what happened to his older brother, Jim, who developed schizophrenia as a young adult.Chase’s account alternates between a fiercely loyal and honest memoir and rigorous scientific exploration. He finds scientific answers to deeply personal questions about the course of his brother’s illness. He describes psychiatric practice from the 1950s—when electroconvulsive shock therapy was common and the use of antipsychotic medications was in its infancy—to the development of newer treatments in the 1990s.
About the Author
I was born in Chicago, 1940, then lived in Los Angeles, 1948-1958. Stanford University, B.A, dropped out of Harvard Law School, Ph.D in Psychology from M.I.T. Postdoctoral research in Munich and Seattle before moving to Montreal in 1971. I taught neurobiology at McGill University for 38 years, during which time I did research on snail brains and snail sex, hence my book, Behavior and its Neural Control in Gastropod Molluscs. Since my retirement, I have written about mental illness. The Physical Basis describes how one's philosophical views of the mind-body problem influence his or her attitudes toward mental illness. Schizophrenia is a much more personal book. It is both a memoir of my brother and a scientific account of the disease; this book was more than 50 years in the making.
