People have very long memories about families where there has been an instance of mental illness.
It is passed on in the local folklore for up to five generations that there has been madness in the family, Professor Norman Sartorius of the University of Geneva, Switzerland, said. Stigma against psychiatric disease, and particularly against schizophrenia, is the most important problem in psychiatry today, Professor Sartorius emphasised in the Lilly Psychiatry Lecture. It is the central obstacle we have before us if we want to achieve anything in treatment psychiatry. We must do something about it. It is important to slay the myths that people with schizophrenia are always unreliable and dangerous criminals and that the condition is hereditary, with the family conveying it down the generations, Professor Sartorius said.