•When Dr. Daniel Fisher was a neurochemist working for
the National Institute of
Mental Health in the late 1960s, he was convinced that the key to mental illness was somewhere
in the brain's messenger
chemicals, which he was studying. But that was before he was hospitalized with schizophrenia and got a
first-person perspective.
•"I found that thinking that everything was
determined by chemistry was
very disempowering and very dehumanizing," he said. Fisher, 61, who turned from neuroscience to psychiatry after his
own battle with mental illness, is
now one of the leading proponents of a view that is about as far from the lab bench as one can get.
He believes that with
enough of a support system, people can recover fully from mental illness, even from disorders such as
schizophrenia that are widely
believed to be chronic, long-term illnesses for most people. Psychiatrist To Discuss Recovery Published April 6, 2005 in the Hartford Courant
» By GARRET CONDON, Courant Staff Writer