During one of the schizophrenia support groups that I facilitate, someone quietly said, "I feel like the most unlovable person in the world."
The room became silent. No one rushed to reassure them. No one tried to correct them. We simply stayed with what had been said.
That sentence has stayed with me ever since. It made me wonder whether people living with schizophrenia have ever truly received respect.
It was not simply about loneliness. It was about feeling fundamentally unwanted. As though the diagnosis itself had made them someone to avoid, someone who could never really belong again.
Many people describe a similar experience after receiving a diagnosis. Conversations become shorter. People begin asking only about symptoms, medication, sleep, or relapse. The richness of a person's life slowly disappears behind clinical language. A person who once had fears, hopes, creativity, relationships and memories gradually becomes known primarily through a diagnosis.
Even within mental health services, this experience can sometimes occur. Appointments are often brief because clinicians work under enormous pressure and limited time. Yet from the perspective of the person seeking help, it can feel as though only a very small part of them is being listened to. Their distress becomes translated into symptoms. Their history becomes condensed into a file. The person longs to speak about their life, but the conversation keeps returning to medication, hallucinations, delusions, or risk.
Of course, medication and symptom management are important. They have helped many people. But they are not the whole person.
A human being cannot be understood within five or ten minutes.
A human life cannot be reduced to a checklist.
When this happens repeatedly, something subtle begins to change inside the person. They may begin to feel that who they truly are is somehow too much, too complicated, or too frightening for others to know. They learn to hide parts of themselves. They speak less. They become cautious. They stop expecting to be understood.
Over time, this can become a wound far deeper than the diagnosis itself.
It is the wound of becoming invisible.
Perhaps this is why so many people living with schizophrenia describe themselves not only as ill, but as isolated. They often lose friendships. Families become frightened or overprotective. Employers become hesitant. Society begins to relate to them through fear, stereotypes, or pity. They are no longer simply a neighbour, a colleague, a daughter, a son, or a friend. They become "the schizophrenic."
And once a person is seen only through that lens, respect quietly disappears.
I have come to believe that this loss of respect is one of the deepest forms of suffering experienced by people living with schizophrenia. Long before recovery becomes possible, many have already spent years feeling unseen, unheard, and misunderstood.
Perhaps healing begins not only with reducing symptoms, but with restoring dignity.
Perhaps the first thing every human being longs for is not simply treatment, but respect.
There is a thought that has slowly stayed with me over the years.
I have come to wonder whether the opposite of shame is not pride, but respect.
Shame does not arise simply because we have done something wrong. More often, shame develops because we fear that if another person were to see us as we really are, they would withdraw their love, reject us, or see us as less than human. Shame is deeply relational. It is born in the presence—or sometimes the absence—of another person.
We all hide parts of ourselves that we believe will not be respected.
A mother may deeply love her child and yet, in moments of exhaustion or despair, find herself overwhelmed by anger or even violent thoughts. These thoughts can fill her with immense shame because she believes that a "good mother" should never have them. She hides them, not because she is a monster, but because she fears she will lose respect if she speaks them aloud.
In different ways, all of us do this.
We hide our fears, our jealousy, our rage, our grief, our loneliness, our failures, our dependency, and sometimes even our love. We live in a culture that rewards performance. We learn very early which parts of ourselves will be admired and which parts will be rejected. Slowly, we begin presenting only the self that seems acceptable.
For many people living with schizophrenia, this process becomes even more painful.
They may begin to hide not only their voices or unusual experiences, but their entire existence. They learn not to mention the diagnosis when applying for work. They become careful about whom they trust. They worry that if people truly knew them, they would no longer be welcomed. Some begin to believe what society has repeatedly reflected back to them—that they are dangerous, broken, incapable, or fundamentally unlovable.
When this happens for years, shame begins to settle into the body.
It no longer feels like an emotion. It begins to feel like an identity.
"I am the problem."
"I don't belong."
"There must be something deeply wrong with me."
This is why respect matters so much.
Respect tells the person something entirely different.
It says, "I want to understand your experience."
"You matter."
"I am not afraid of your humanity."
"You do not have to hide here."
Perhaps this is one of the most important things that happens in a good support group.
People often think that support groups exist to exchange advice or coping strategies. Those things can certainly be helpful. But I think something much deeper is taking place.
People begin to experience one another without constantly trying to fix, diagnose, or explain each other.
Someone can say, "I hear voices."
Another can say, "I feel ashamed."
Someone else may speak about childhood abuse, loneliness, medication, despair, or the fear of relapse.
No one immediately interrupts.
No one says, "Don't think like that."
No one tells them to be positive.
Instead, people listen.
And something remarkable begins to happen.
The person slowly becomes visible again.
Not because their symptoms have disappeared.
Not because their suffering has ended.
But because someone has finally remained present while listening to their experience.
Perhaps that is what respect really is.
To remain with another person's humanity without turning away.
Community becomes important for this very reason.
A person who has repeatedly experienced neglect, humiliation, rejection, or invisibility cannot heal entirely alone. Human beings become wounded in relationships, but they also heal through relationships.
When we belong to a community where we are treated with dignity, something inside us slowly softens. The world becomes a little less frightening. We no longer carry every burden by ourselves. We begin borrowing hope from one another until we are able to find our own again.
Belonging does not remove suffering.
But it makes suffering bearable.
Perhaps this is why so many people living with schizophrenia describe feeling that they have finally come home when they meet others who truly understand their experience.
Not because everyone is the same.
But because, perhaps for the first time in many years, they no longer have to earn the right to be respected.
There is one final thought that I keep returning to.
I sometimes wonder whether, for many people living with schizophrenia, healing is not simply about making the voices quieter or reducing unusual experiences. Perhaps it is also about slowly making visible what has remained hidden for so long.
For some people, that hidden place may contain severe childhood trauma, as complex PTSD. For others, it may be years of neglect, loneliness, humiliation, rape, sexual assault, somatic wounds, bullying, loss, or the quiet violence of never truly being seen. Sometimes these experiences happened so early in life that they cannot be remembered as stories. Yet they may continue to live in the body, in emotions that seem too large, in fears that have no clear beginning, or in a persistent feeling that the world is not safe.
The body often remembers what the mind cannot easily put into words.
This is why healing can be such slow somatic work.
It is not simply remembering facts from childhood. It is slowly becoming able to feel what once could not be felt, to give language to experiences that had no words, and to discover that another person can remain with us while we do so. Whether this happens in psychotherapy, in friendship, in family, or in a support group, the experience is often the same. We are no longer carrying our suffering alone.
Perhaps this is what respect finally allows.
Respect creates enough safety for hidden parts of ourselves to emerge without fear of ridicule or rejection.
Perhaps this is why respect itself can become healing.
When we no longer have to protect ourselves from judgement, something inside us begins to soften. Emotions that have remained frozen for years slowly begin to move again. Grief that could never be cried finds tears. Fear that could never be spoken finds words. Anger that had to remain hidden becomes something that can be understood instead of feared.
Healing, then, is not something another person does to us.
It is something that begins to unfold when another human being creates enough safety for us to become ourselves again.
Perhaps this is why respect is so powerful.
It gives us permission to stop performing and start living.
A person can say, "I have schizophrenia."
They can also say, "I was frightened as a child."
Or, "I feel ashamed."
Or, "I am angry."
Or, "Sometimes I still hear voices."
Or simply, "I want someone to know what my life has been like."
None of these experiences need to be judged. None of them need to make someone less worthy of love.
When we are deeply listened to, something begins to change. We become more real to ourselves. We no longer have to spend all our energy hiding. We discover that dignity is not something we earn after recovery. It is something that belongs to us simply because we are human.
Perhaps this is why I often think about communities such as Kingsley Hall. It was far from perfect, but it represented a radical idea—that people experiencing psychosis could live together with others who approached them first as human beings rather than as diagnoses. The place had a longing behind it that remains deeply meaningful. It was a longing to create a place where people could live with dignity instead of fear.
Sometimes I also think about Henry David Thoreau living beside Walden Pond. Many people dream of escaping to a quiet place, away from society, away from judgement, away from noise. Others think of the borderland in Toba Tek Singh, belonging nowhere, caught between two worlds, unable to find a place that truly feels like home.
I wonder whether what many people living with schizophrenia are searching for is not really isolation.
Perhaps they are searching for home.
And perhaps home is not a house, a forest, or a distant mountain.
Perhaps home is the place where someone finally looks at you without fear.
Where you no longer have to explain why your mind works differently.
Where your diagnosis does not become your identity.
Where your story matters as much as your symptoms.
Where your pain is listened to instead of dismissed.
Where you can speak about your childhood, your voices, your hopes, your grief, and your dreams without becoming less worthy in the eyes of another person.
That is what respect feels like.
Respect does not mean pretending that schizophrenia is easy or denying the reality of suffering. It does not mean romanticising psychosis or ignoring the importance of treatment. Rather, it means refusing to reduce a human being to a diagnosis.
Every person deserves to be listened to.
Every person deserves dignity.
Every person deserves to belong.
Perhaps healing begins there.
Not only with medication.
Not only with therapy.
But with the simple, profound experience of discovering that you are still worthy of love, respect, and belonging exactly as you are. Perhaps healing begins the moment a person no longer has to earn the right to be respected.