The Challenges of Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia brings both psychological and societal challenges. Medication can help but resilience, says psychiatrist Dr. Alexander Charney, is another key element of learning to live with the disease. In this podcast, Dr. Charney discusses the diagnosis and treatment of schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, and how to persist to their challenges.
[00:00:00] Stephen Calabria: From the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, this is Road to Resilience, a podcast about facing adversity. I'm Stephen Calabria.
[00:00:11] On today's episode, we welcome Alexander Charney, MD, PhD, and Associate Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, with primary appointments in the Department of Psychiatry and Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, as well as secondary appointments in the Departments of Neuroscience and Neurosurgery.
[00:00:28] He is the director of the Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine and serves as executive director of the Blau Center at Mount Sinai, which provides clinical care and original research into mental illness.
[00:00:40] Dr. Charney has been the lead data scientist on some of the largest genetic studies ever conducted on schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
[00:00:47] Today Dr. Charney offers insight into how patients and their families may cope with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and how promising new research offers hope for those who are weathering the storm.
[00:00:57] We're honored to have Dr. Charney on the show.
[00:01:00] Dr. Alex Charney, welcome to Road to Resilience.
[00:01:04] Dr. Alex Charney: Thanks for having me.
[00:01:05] Stephen Calabria: Could you please introduce yourself?
[00:01:07] Dr. Alex Charney: My name is Alex Charney. I'm a psychiatrist and a geneticist by training. I work at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, and I am the director of the Charles Bronfman Institute for personalized Medicine here.
[00:01:22] Stephen Calabria: Now, sir, you study schizophrenia and you treat patients with schizophrenia. To start us off, what is schizophrenia?
[00:01:31] Dr. Alex Charney: Schizophrenia is a mental illness. It is a mental illness that begins in the early 20s of an individual's life. And the symptoms that generally bring an individual with schizophrenia to the attention of mental health care provider, such as myself, are hallucinations and delusions. Hallucinations are perceptual experiences that are not real.