Schizophrenia Daily News Blog

Schizophrenia Prevention - Tactics for Individuals and Families

Schizophrenia causes and the potential for prevention has been the focus of an increasing amount of research during the past few decades. The research is still progressing in this area but when a member of the staff at schizophrenia.com became pregnant recently we decided to take a closer look at the research with the goal of more clearly identifying some potential actions that a person or family could take that might lower the risk of a child developing schizophrenia or other mental illnesses.

We've contacted a half dozen leading schizophrenia researchers at universities around the world who have a great deal of expertise in this area and have incorporated the feedback we've received into a new document that highlights actions that may help in lowering risk for schizophrenia. As new information becomes available on this topic, we will add it to this document. Of course, there is no guarantee that if any or all of these "risk reduction" steps are taken, that a given person will not develop schizophrenia. There are many factors outside of our control.

Our focus with this document is on helping individuals and families who have a family history of mental illness (especially schizophrenia) to lower the risk of schizophrenia being developed in the future. We hope you find it valuable.

One cautionary note to individuals who have schizophrenia, as well as parents and family members of people who have it. Researchers tell us that its impossible to look back retrospectively and try to determine with any certainty what the "cause" of a person's schizophrenia is. Nobody knows yet for sure what genes result in schizophrenia risk, which of these genes a person has, or how exactly the interaction with the many different environmental factors might have ultimately resulted in a person's schizophrenia (or if one or two of the variables were changed, if the outcome would have been different). It is therefore entirely inappropriate to "blame" anything or anyone for someone's development of schizophrenia in the past.

Read the Document: Schizophrenia Prevention and Risk Reduction