Eileen Malaspina dreamed of becoming a physician. But in 1971, during her senior year in high school, her grades began to deteriorate. She became increasingly withdrawn and complained that the neighbors were talking about her. After graduation she entered not the college to which she had won a scholarship but a hospital. Diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder, a devastating mix of mania, depression, and psychosis, she never made it to medical school. But her only sister, Dolores, did. Now a psychiatrist at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, Dolores Malaspina applied to study medicine with one aim: to understand the illness that afflicts her younger sister.
"At the time, people had the idea that schizophrenia was somehow a disease caused by how a family raised someone," Malaspina says. "It was thought that there was a style of parenting called the 'schizophrenogenic mother,' that a mother who raised a ...
