The book titled Our Most Troubling Madness by TM Luhrmann and Jocelyn Marrow presents 12 case studies in which the diagnosis and experience of schizophrenia is examined across cultures and situations. The book aims to examine how schizophrenia is shaped by its social contexts. This includes analyses of how life is lived with schizophrenia in different settings, and how settings alter the likelihood of different outcomes as well as the structure of the symptoms.

“Increasingly we know that our genes interact with our environment and that this epigenetic interaction deeply shapes our lives … we now have direct evidence that people are more likely to fall ill with schizophrenia in some social settings than in others, and more likely to recover in some social settings than in others.”

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Feature: Camila Quintero Franco at Unsplash, Creative Commons