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Join Dr. Fang Liu, the University of Toronto, CAMH and Don Tapscott and Ana Lopes in breaking new ground on the causes and effective treatments of schizophrenia. Your donation will receive a full tax receipt. Please click here.

It is time for a sea of change in our attitudes toward mental illness. Current medications really only treat the psychotic symptoms (paranoid thinking and hallucinations). They don’t in any way address the underlying abnormalities in the brain (caused by obstetrical trauma, genetic abnormality or other factors) that appear to develop during adolescence or earlier. Soon, there could be ways to help the brain follow a more normal developmental course.

Today we have nowhere near the proper level of funding. Research into schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorders and other psychiatric disorders has been maintained at a paltry level compared to other major disease groups, such as cancer, heart disease, stroke, AIDS, or Alzheimer’s. Quantum leaps in understanding illnesses of the brain will only come if funding is brought up to the level available for the study of these other diseases. If we are really serious about addressing these problems, then funding has to be brought even higher so that the most capable scientists will gravitate to this research area as has been done in the case of AIDS research. There is simply no excuse for the meager number of research dollars currently made available.

“Perhaps the time has finally come for a fundamental change in public attitudes about brain disorders. The time has come for another $12 million and $120 million and $1.2 billion to give the resources our brilliant researchers urgently need to understand the real causes of illness and develop truly effective prevention and treatment programs. ” – Don Tapscott