Part 1 of Essay
Schizophrenia is one of our most important public health problems. It is a common, tragic, and devastating mental illness that typically strikes young people just when they are maturing into adulthood. Once it strikes, morbidity is high (60 percent of patients are receiving disability benefits within the first year after o ....

Part 2 of Essay
.... shared by most investigators is that schizophrenia is a disease of neural connectivity caused by multiple factors that affect brain development. (3,4,5) Our current model of the causation of schizophrenia is very similar to that used to understand cancer. That is, schizophrenia probably occurs as a consequence of multiple "hits," which include some combination of inherited genetic factors and external, nongenetic factors that affect the regulation and expression of genes governing brain function or that injure th ....