I am a woman with chronic schizophrenia. I have spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals. I could have ended up living most of my life on a back ward, but things turned out quite differently.

I am a woman with chronic schizophrenia. I have spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals. I could have ended up living most of my life on a back ward, but things turned out quite differently.

We must stop criminalizing mental illness. It's a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States.

There are not schizophrenics. There are people with schizophrenia and these people may be your spouse, they may be your child, they may be your neighbor, they may be your friend, they may be your coworker.

Everyone becomes psychotic in his or her own ways.

The schizophrenic mind is not so much split as shattered. I like to say schizophrenia is like a waking nightmare.

Portray [people with mental illness] sympathetically, and portray them in all the richness and depth of their experience as people, and not as diagnoses.