Robert Kolker

Schizophrenia is not about multiple personalities. It is about walling oneself off from consciousness, first slowly and then all at once, until you are no longer accessing anything that others accept as real.

Donald told the doctor that for years he had not been himself at all, but rather a mirror of what other people wanted him to be.

But that concession only raised a more puzzling question. “In the strictest sense, it is not schizophrenia that is inherited,” he said. “It is clear that not everybody who harbors the genes develops schizophrenia.” Schizophrenia was definitely genetic, but not always passed down. And so they all were still left wondering: How could this be?
“The genes that are implicated,” Rosenthal said, “produce an effect whose nature we have not yet been able to fathom.”