The abandoned illness: schizophrenia and how it took seven years to get a diagnosis | Anonymous
It is unlikely Sunny will ever work again. How could he explain to any potential employer that his only crime was the ‘crime’ of schizophrenia?
As a child, his grandmother nicknamed him Sunny because he was always so bright and happy. On leaving primary school, he achieved a “band 6” in both maths and English. His mother was optimistic; perhaps he would be a scholar like his grandfather. It wasn’t until his mid-teens that the signs appeared. At 15, Sunny dropped out of school. At 16, the local mental health crisis team described him as “prodromal”. His mother had to Google the meaning: “relating to or denoting the period between the appearance of initial symptoms of an illness and the full development”.
At 17, Sunny decided he was lame in one leg and took to walking with a cane. The doctor could find no physical
