According to news reports earlier today, the Kony 2012 director Jason Russell, 33, was “hospitalized last week in San Diego after witnesses saw him running through streets in his underwear, screaming incoherently and banging his fists on the pavement.” His wife now says he’s been diagnosed with brief reactive psychosis, which is technically called “brief psychotic disorder.”

Brief psychotic disorder could be most simply thought of as a form of short-term schizophrenia, since many of the symptoms of the disorders are exactly the same. The primary difference is that in a brief psychotic disorder, the psychosis is less than 30 days.

Let’s delve more into brief reactive psychosis and talk about how one “gets it” (don’t worry, it’s not catching).

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In A Lethal Inheritance: A Mother Discovers the Science Behind Three Generations of Mental Illness, science journalist Victoria Costello weaves the stories of her family’s mental illness with significant studies on genetics, early intervention and evidence-based treatment.

When Costello’s oldest son is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, she traces her family’s history of mental illness and makes some surprising discoveries — such as her grandfather’s well-guarded suicide.

A Lethal Inheritance is a must-read for anyone who’s been touched by mental illness, especially parents who feel helpless and hopeless. Costello shatters the myth that mental illness is a death sentence, along with countless other misconceptions.

She also recounts how she and her sons coped with their mental illness and achieved full recovery. And she does an excellent job of simplifying complex concepts and informing readers of the newest research.

Family members with schizophrenia, one of the more frustrating mental illnesses to treat, often face a bumpy treatment road filled with potholes and setbacks. Many people with schizophrenia believe there’s nothing wrong with them. Or the medications they take often have significant, negative side effects.

So even though schizophrenia can often be treated fairly effectively with medications and psychotherapy, it often is not because medication compliance becomes a significant ongoing issue.

This results in many people with schizophrenia going in and out of inpatient care. Because inpatient psychiatric care is virtually non-existent in most states any longer, this means a primary treatment point for people with chronic, serious mental illness defaults to the local hospital emergency room (ER).

While most ERs are setup to handle people with a serious mental illness fairly well, ERs aren’t exactly known for their warm-fuzzy, emotionally-supportive environments. So people slip through the cracks.

In this case, the woman with schizophrenia who slipped through one hospital ER’s cracks was Cindy Ciarafoni, a mother of two, who died when she apparently wandered out of the ER and tried crossing a busy highway. She was struck by a car and later died from her injuries. Now her family wants to know what happened, but the hospital is being tight-lipped.

Anyone who’s experienced a loved one — whether a family member or friend — who has schizophrenia knows it is often an unpredictable and sometimes-scary relationship. Scary because you’re never quite sure what’s coming next, or how a particular hallucination might manifest itself in the person’s behavior or decisions.

But schizophrenia, like all mental illness, can also be a teacher. Albeit often a hard one.

Dr. Anne Aspler, writing in the Globe and Mail earlier this week, recounts her experiences in what she’s learned in growing up with a mother who suffers from schizophrenia, and the fear she lived in during her early adulthood that she, too, might suffer from this disorder.

Consider these alarming statistics:

* By 2020, behavioral health disorders will surpass all physical diseases as a major cause of disability worldwide.

* Of the more than 6 million people served by state mental health authorities across the nation, only 21 percent are employed.

* More than half of adolescents in the United States who fail to complete high school have a diagnosable psychiatric disorder.

* Between 2009 and 2011 states cumulatively cut more than $1.8 billion from their budgets for services for children and adults living with mental illness.

* In 2009, there were an estimated 45.1 million adults aged 18 or older in the United States with any mental illness in the past year. This represents 19.9 percent of all adults in the U.S.

*Serious mental illnesses cost society $193.2 billion in lost earnings per year.

* The annual total estimated societal cost of substance abuse in the U.S. is $510 billion.

* In 2008, an estimated 9.8 million adults aged 18 and older in the U.S. has a serious mental illness.

With our economy still in the toilet, states and federal government threaten to cut even more dollars in mental health funding, which would result in less or no access to mental health treatment and services for countless Americans. Ultimately the cuts steal the one thing that keeps those of us struggling with chronic mood disorders alive: hope.

A police officer only needs to use “reasonable force” to make an arrest. How many Fullerton, Calif. police officers does it take to arrest one man?

Well, it took five patrol cars, 6 officers, tasering 37-year-old Kelly Thomas numerous times, and beating him so badly that he went into a coma. And then died a few days later.

What was Thomas’s alleged crime that resulted in his death? Breaking into cars, looking for things to steal.

Welcome to our more violent America, where citizens stand by while the police beating took place, too afraid to intervene and save Thomas’s life. Is this what we’ve come to?

Last month, Andrew Brown writing for the UK’s Guardian, noted when Professor David Nutt kept referring to depression as a “brain disease” on a popular UK television program.

We commend Andrew Brown for his calling out Professor Nutt in trying to dumb down the portrayal of mental disorders to simply “brain diseases.” Mental disorders remain complex disorders that involve all aspect of a person’s functioning and life — their brain and biology, their psychological makeup and personality, and their social interactions and relationships with others. The cause isn’t just one of these things in the vast majority of people who have a mental illness — the cause is all of these things, in differing proportions.

I’ve written about this in the past and in fact, I tag it as one of the top 10 myths of mental illness — because it still is. Even well-meaning family physicians and psychiatrists still refer to the false chemical imbalance theory as though it were fact. A theory, by the way, that has never enjoyed strong research support.

Take a minute and answer this question: Is anyone really normal today?

I mean, even those who claim they are normal may, in fact, be the most neurotic among us, swimming with a nice pair of scuba fins down the river of Denial. Having my psychiatric file published online and in print for public viewing, I get to hear my share of dirty secrets—weird obsessions, family dysfunction, or disguised addiction—that are kept concealed from everyone but a self-professed neurotic and maybe a shrink.

“Why are there so many disorders today?” Those seven words, or a variation of them, surface a few times a week. And my take on this query is so complex that, to avoid sounding like my grad school professors making an erudite case that fails to communicate anything to average folks like me, I often shrug my shoulders and move on to a conversation about dessert. Now that I can talk about all day.

Here’s the abridged edition of my guess as to why we mark up more pages of the DSM-IV today than, say, a century ago (even though the DSM-IV had yet to be born).

Schizophrenia is one of the more debilitating types of mental illness. Over a year ago, I wrote an article for Psych Central about living with schizophrenia. In the beginning, I featured an excerpt from E. Fuller Torrey’s, M.D., excellent book Surviving Schizophrenia: A Manual for Families, Patients and Providers, because it captures the confusion and misinformation about this disorder.

“Your daughter has schizophrenia,” I told the woman.

“Oh, my God, anything but that,” she replied. “Why couldn’t she have leukemia or some other disease instead?”

“But if she had leukemia she might die,” I pointed out. “Schizophrenia is a much more treatable disease.”

The woman looked sadly at me, then down at the floor. She spoke softly. “I would still prefer that my daughter had leukemia.”

Even though Dr. Torrey wrote this part in the book’s first edition in 1983, I think it still applies today. Though we’ve made advances in treatment and some strides in minimizing stigma, people with schizophrenia still face little empathy or even sympathy from others — in addition to the devastating symptoms they deal with on a daily basis.

That’s why, today, I’d like to share with you several excerpts from Torrey’s book in hopes that they’ll help us to better understand the disorder and be able to put ourselves in the shoes of someone with schizophrenia.

It’s common knowledge that creatives can be eccentric. We’ve seen this throughout history. Even Plato and Aristotle observed odd behaviors among playwrights and poets, writes Harvard University researcher Shelley Carson, author of Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity and Innovation in Your Life, in the May/June 2011 issue of Scientific American.

She gave several examples of creatives’ strange behaviors:

“Albert Einstein picked up cigarette butts off the street to get tobacco for his pipe; Howard Hughes spent entire days on a chair in the middle of the supposedly germ-free zone of his Beverly Hills Hotel suite; the composer Robert Schumann believed that his musical compositions were dictated to him by Beethoven and other deceased luminaries from their tombs; and Charles Dickens is said to have fended off imaginary urchins with his umbrella as he walked the streets of London.”

But what’s most compelling is that research has corroborated the connection between creativity and eccentricity. And it starts, interestingly enough, with schizotypal personality, a milder version of schizotypal personality disorder.

Would you imagine the content of people’s delusions would change with the changing times?

Well, according to Vaughan Bell writing over at Mind Hacks, they do. …