Dr. Andreasen is one of the world's leading researchers on the diagnosis and treatment of schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses. In the year 2000, she received the National Medal of Science and The Lieber Prize for Outstanding Research in Schizophrenia. Dr. Andreasen has used brain imaging to look at structure, blood flow and metabolism in the brain. Building on a previous discovery that schizophrenia is, in fact, a brain disease, she has determined that it is not one particular area of the brain that is abnormal in people with the disorder. Rather, it is a disease of communication within the brain - it affects how different parts of the brain talk to each other.
Schizophrenia affects almost all human mental activity, and the symptoms are extremely diverse.
Her theory explains this diversity of symptoms. If the disease affects the communication of networks within the brain, then proper connections cannot made, which can lead to hallucinations or delusions. That is, people with schizophrenia misinterpret the outer world - they cannot distinguish between what's inside the mind and what's outside. Dr. Andreasen offers hope for the future. People are now thinking about how to make these enormous domains of science meet in the middle and illuminate what happens in mental illness.