Schizophrenia is a brain disease. Patients’ symptoms run a spectrum. They can include negative symptoms like social withdrawal. Or psychosis when someone is detached from reality.

Usually, it looks like hallucinations - seeing or hearing something that isn’t there. Or delusions - fixed false beliefs that a person can’t change.

For Michelle, it began in her teens with paranoid thoughts about her mother. And again at age 18 with her college roommate. It would be three more years before she was diagnosed as schizophrenic.