Otherwise, they can easily become victims of other peoples's biases and prejudices. Sometimes schizophrenia, with its heightened sense of personal significance, the extra energy of a manic episode, or the desire to evade the responsibilities of a well person, may interfere with a person's willingness to learn to manage the illness with medications. If people's delusional worlds indicate that they have special importance to the universe, they naturally hesitate to trade this state for the ordinary world in which they feel no special significance. Even people who experience being persecuted by the F.B.I. or other powerful forces may feel a sense of being special which they hate to relinquish. The argument that the world of mania or the world of psychosis is more real and to be preferred to the one others experience may be difficult to answer.
Families usually find that it is futile to argue about whose reality is the correct one.
They find it more fruitful to express the hope that their relative will elect to give up the world of delusion that their friends and families cannot share and choose to live in a world that reunites them with important others. Some men and women who have mental illnesses find still other reasons for rejecting medication. They may have followed all the recommendations made by treatment teams only to find that their lives were still seriously compromised by the illness. They still have low levels of energy and drive, are often plagued by anxieties and depression, unable to hold a job, and forced to live at a poverty level. They see no hope for love and marriage, and the scourge of stigmas is everywhere.