Schizophrenia and other psychotic illnesses interfere with the ability to think, act and feel. When acutely ill, a person may lose contact with reality. The symptoms are often very distressing for people affected and those who care for them. These Speaking from experience video clips offer first-hand accounts from people who have experienced Schizophrenia. It was produced in partnership with SANE Australia.

"Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins--aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a...

"Cadence "Cady" Archer arrives on Harvard's campus searching for answers about her brother, a schizophrenic genius who leapt from his dorm room window the year before. Eric's brilliance overshadowed Cady growing up, but she worshipped and adored him--evenas he became more unstable, retreating deeper into his secretive work on multidimensional spacetime and isolating himself from everyone around him. Losing Eric has left a black hole in Cady's life,...

"Award-winning novelist and poet Gayle Brandeis's wrenching memoir of her complicated family history and her mother's suicide Gayle Brandeis's mother disappeared just after Gayle gave birth to her youngest child. Several days later, her body was found: she had hanged herself in the utility closet of a Pasadena parking garage. In this searing, formally inventive memoir, Gayle describes the dissonance between being a new mother, a sweet-smelling infant...