Schizophrenia is the psychiatric illness about which the most misconceptions abound. It’s not so much the ‘negative’ symptoms that cause misunderstanding, devastating as they are — social withdrawal, self-neglect, flattening of mood — but the auditory hallucinations and delusions, often of a paranoid nature, that can accompany it.

Nathan Filer, a psychiatric nurse, wrote the best novel I’ve read about schizophrenia, the Costa-winning The Shock of the Fall.