"sympathy and understanding" or "scorn and condemnation"

"In 1974 a small group of parents became the first in the nation to publicly refuse blame for causing their children to have schizophrenia. They formed Parents of Adult Schizophrenics and their activism led to parents around the nation demanding changes in how the disease is understood and treated....[T]hese families launched one of the fastest growing grassroots movements the nation had seen to date, ushering in an era of dramatic advances in understanding, treatment and brain research." Said the founder of Parents of Adult Schizophrenics, Eve Oliphant, in a 1977 speech to the World Congress of Psychiatry, "We failed to understand why parents of a child with leukemia were treated with sympathy and understanding, while parents of a child with schizophrenia were treated with scorn and condemnation." These quotes are from a film documentary, When Medicine Got it Wrong, that was shown recently on PBS stations around the country.


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