A woman with a 20-year psychiatric history began taking an immunosuppressant. Suddenly, her seeming schizophrenia vanished. https://t.co/AHKtnfI9U8
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) July 28, 2025
Schizophrenia is the condition that divided psychiatry and neurology. Neurologists can find brain cancer and other physical conditions and psychiatric drugs and therapy can help many mental illnesses, but schizophrenia was considered an incurable lifelong condition that can at best be controlled by drugs, but only in some patients. Worst of all, no one knew what caused it. However, there is a growing awareness that some patients labeled as schizophrenic may be suffering from an autoimmune disorder. Occasionally, a person with schizophrenia is treated for another illness, and drugs meant to suppress the immune system actually cure the delusions. Mary was one of them. After more than 20 years of delusions, she emerged from treatment for leukemia with no psychiatric symptoms at all.
The good news is that there are pilot programs designed to identify schizophrenia patients who could benefit from immunotherapy. But there's still the question of how someone with many years of delusions in their past can reintegrate with family, friends, and the world once they have been cured. Mary's daughters didn't feel they knew their mother at all after the delusions were gone. Mary herself doesn't know how to confront her years of insanity and her behavior as her children were growing up. Read her story and the potential of immunotherapy for schizophrenia in an article from The New Yorker. -via Strange Company