In this podcast I talk about my research on the biological basis of schizophrenia using brain imaging and my attempts to understand symptoms such as hallucinations in terms of brain based cognitive processes. I describe what schizophrenia is like from the point of view of clinicians and from the point of view of patients. I suggest that the experiences described by patients in history are very similar to those described today. Finally, I discuss treatments. There has been much improvement since the discovery of drug treatments in the 1950s, but we still have not identified the causes of schizophrenia and, for the majority of patients, life remains very hard.
Chris Frith is Emeritus professor of Neuropsychology and the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at UCL and Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy.