“Even one percent ends up being almost a million people in the world who should be treated with a different kind of medicine.”
A Bronx woman spent two decades diagnosed with schizophrenia, then her symptoms vanished entirely after chemotherapy for lymphoma. Turns out she likely had autoimmune neuroinflammation, not schizophrenia at all. Scientists now estimate 1 to 5 percent of schizophrenia diagnoses worldwide may actually be treatable autoimmune disorders. Once the label went on her chart, nobody questioned it for a decade across multiple hospitalizations, which tells you everything about how psychiatric diagnosis actually works in practice.