David Laing Dawson and  Marvin Ross have set up this site to provide reliable resources for families and friends of those who suffer from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses. They have complementary credentials to accomplish this task. Dawson is a psychiatrist, writer, filmmaker and artist. Ross is an accomplished medical writer. They believe that along with scholarly texts, DSM IV descriptions, articles, pamphlets and books -  novels, films, short stories and plays can lead to a fuller understanding of the complex, rich, painful, and very human world of the mentally ill.

A man who believes he is born of the stars and insists he be addressed as professor though he has no association with any university and who has long been incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital because he harbors a delusion that certain famous women love him, goes before the Supreme Court of Canada. The Court addresses him as Professor and decides he is competent to refuse treatment.

A man known to a generation for his performance on Saturday Night Live is jailed for over a year for harassing his wife. He believes his real wife was replaced either by an impostor or an alien.

Both of these men are delusional. They suffer from schizophrenia. They have illnesses that respond well to pharmacological treatment, yet they go untreated.

These two cases are well known, but thousands of other people suffering from schizophrenia live on the streets, in our jails, our flophouses and shelters.

In a rush to de-institutionalize the mentally ill and to protect their rights, we have left half of them to their own devices, to make their own way in this world while suffering cognitive impairment, barraged by hallucinations and delusions, unable to cope with our complex social world. At least ten percent commit suicide. The rest constitute about thirty percent of the homeless population, and twenty percent of the jail population, often, in the span of a year, moving from hostel, to shopping mall, to jail, to hostel - anonymous shadows to all but their families.

According to the World Health Organization, 44-70% of people with mental illness receive no treatment whatsoever. A 2005 survey of prisons in Canada found that the number of prisoners with mental health problems doubled in the past 10 years. There was not enough money to provide them with treatment.

In Australia, psychiatric beds declined from 15,000 to 6,000 while the number of prisoners doubled in the period 1986-2001. The largest mental health institution in the US is Rikers Island in New York City – a jail with 3000 mentally ill people on any given day. Steve Leifman of the Florida Supreme Court stated that more Americans are being treated for mental health problems in jail than are being treated in hospitals or other treatment facilities.

Leifman points out that we have gone back to the early 1800s when families with a mentally ill member dropped him/her off at a nearby jail or prison for care.

In Australia, 75% of those in homeless shelters have mental illness while 20% are schizophrenic and 33% are bipolar. In the UK, there has been a three fold increase in the number of homeless suffering from mental illness. It was 3% in 1991 and is up to 8% in 2006. 35% of the homeless in the US have mental illness.

All this is happening at a time of unprecedented wealth, dramatically increased knowledge of the brain, and effective medical treatment for schizophrenia. Why is this happening in progressive countries like Canada, the US, Australia, and many other countries of the world?