Schizophrenia is a behavioral disorder that affects both men and women. It involves a difficulty in distinguishing between real and imagined experiences. The disorder usually sees its onset in the teenage years or young adulthood. It is often called a type of split personality or multiple personality disorder. Often people with this condition find themselves socially isolated primarily because they have difficulty making normal social responses and have generally disorganized minds. The irritability caused by living with a confused mind most of the time often causes feelings of depression, anxiety, and sometimes suicidal thoughts. With treatment many people manage this affliction well, however others have difficulty and this leads to many other social problems. In this essay I hope to explore some first-person accounts of living with and dealing with schizophrenia, as well as examine some popular texts about culture and academic but non-medical texts that examine schizophrenia. Such a complex disease and its patients have become the study and focus of many different disciplines over the years, so this will allow me to draw information from other non-medical disciplines, providing a more 'real' account of the condition. Two main theorists invented the condition we know today as schizophrenia; Emil Kreaplien and Eugen Bleuler. Kreaplien initially described “dementia praecox,” something we now understand to be schizophrenia. Kreaplien distinguished between two disorders, manic-depressive illness and dementia praecox, and believed that although these disorders were "systematically different, they possessed a common core". Kreaplien believed that the original majo......half of the paper......bid.Robert Desjarlais, A Reader in Medical Anthropology Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) 160.Robert Desjarlais , A Reader in Medical Anthropology Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) 160.Ibid.Ibid, 163.Ibid.Robert Desjarlais, A Reader in Medical Anthropology Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell , 2010), 164.Ibid.Ibid.Robert Desjarlais, A Reader in Medical Anthropology Theoretical Trajectories, Emerging Realities (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010),166.Ibid.Ibid, 168.Ibid, 170.Jonathon M. Metzl, The Protest Psychosis (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009), ix.Ibid.Ibid.Ibid, x.Ibid, xi.Jonathon M. Metzl, The Psychosis of Protest (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009), 3.Ibid.