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Schizophrenia

Approximately 3.5 million people are living with schizophrenia in the U.S.

Watching a loved one go through their first psychotic episode can be a life-altering, terrifying experience. Schizophrenia robs young people of their chance at a life of independence, leading to decades of challenges for the patient, their family, and friends.

Schizophrenia is a chronic brain disorder triggered by genetic, epigenetic, developmental, and environmental factors that interfere with brain development and function. Characterized by diverse psychopathology, schizophrenia’s core features are delusions and hallucinations, impaired motivation, social withdrawal, and cognitive impairment (poor performance over a wide range of cognitive functions).

Discovering more about this disease, its genetic origins, and environmental triggers could help doctors diagnose and treat the condition. But preventing the devastating illness in the first place is the ultimate goal of schizophrenia research.

Around 80–90% of people with schizophrenia are unemployed
Less than 50% receive appropriate care
Schizophrenia’s cause remains a mystery, but the Lieber Institute is researching hundreds of slight genetic differences that increase the risk for developing this brain disease and the role that early development, including placental health, plays in the later development of schizophrenia.

Key Publications

Electrophysiological measures from human iPSC-derived neurons are associated with schizophrenia clinical status and predict individual cognitive performance
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022
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Regional Heterogeneity in Gene Expression, Regulation, and Coherence in the Frontal Cortex and Hippocampus across Development and Schizophrenia


Neuron, 2019
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Profiling gene expression in the human dentate gyrus granule cell layer reveals insights into schizophrenia and its genetic risk.
Nature neuroscience, 2020
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Genetic insights into the neurodevelopmental origins of schizophrenia.
Nature reviews neuroscience, 2017
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No Family Should Suffer Without Answers

Behind every diagnosis of Severe Depression, Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, or Autism is a person, a family, and an urgent search for answers.
We’re building a future where every mind has a chance to thrive but we can’t do it alone.

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Want to do more? Explore other ways to get involved and help move us closer to a future without mental illness.

Latest news

When Brain Cells Stop Listening to Each Other
Schizophrenia may be less about individual broken genes and more about how genes stop working together and the findings could change everything about how we treat this complex disorder.
Scientists Just Mapped the Brain’s Reward Center
The First Detailed Map of a Key Reward Center in Your Brain, And It Could Change How We Treat Addiction and Mental Illness
A New Path to Understanding Schizophrenia
Imagine trying to understand how a city works by only looking at individual buildings, while ignoring the roads, phone lines, and internet connections that link them together

Help Change What’s Possible
for Schizophrenia

Your support helps Lieber scientists study the biology of schizophrenia, uncover its earliest origins and pursue new paths toward better treatments and prevention.

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