What would you do if your mind started playing tricks on you – if familiar voices suddenly sounded strange or shadows on the wall began whispering your name? What if the people around you stopped seeing you and only saw a diagnosis?

For thousands of people in India, this isn’t fiction. It’s schizophrenia – a condition often shrouded in silence, feared more than it’s understood.

Even as mental health becomes a growing conversation in India, schizophrenia remains stuck in the shadows. It’s reduced to a plot twist in a thriller, a punchline in casual conversation, or a label no one wants to claim. The word alone can change how someone is seen, from a neighbour or colleague to someone “not quite right.”

But how much of what we think we know is actually true?

To separate fact from fear, The Better India spoke to Dr. Mala Khanna, a clinical psychologist who has spent years working with people diagnosed with schizophrenia. From busting myths like “split personality” to sharing real stories of resilience, Dr. Khanna invites us to see beyond the stigma and into the very human experience behind the diagnosis. Joining her is clinical psychologist Dr. Shweta Sharma, who adds crucial context about symptoms, trauma, and the road to recovery.

Myth 1: “Schizophrenia means having a split personality”

This is one of the most common and misleading myths about schizophrenia.

“People often confuse schizophrenia with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), where someone has different identity states. But schizophrenia has nothing to do with ‘split personalities’,” Dr. Khanna points out.

Dr. Shweta Sharma elaborates, “One of the most common and misleading myths in India is that schizophrenia means ‘split personality.’ This confusion leads to stigma, fear, and delayed treatment. But let’s set the record straight. Schizophrenia is a chronic, severe mental health condition that affects a person’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviours. It involves psychotic symptoms like hallucinations, delusions, disorganised thinking, social withdrawal, and flattened affect.”

“In schizophrenia, the core disturbance is in reality orientation, the person often loses touch with reality. This impaired reality testing is a key feature, and it can affect:

• Time orientation (confused about day/time)
• Place orientation (unsure where they are),
• Person orientation (mistrust or misidentification of others),
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