Is medication always necessary to treat schizophrenia?

Professor Tom Craig: Is medication always necessary? That’s a really tricky question. You are speaking to a doctor, to a psychiatrist right? So a slight bias in that, and I’m going to say 'yes'.

You can recover from schizophrenia. Whether that’s a direct result of any of the treatment, I hope it is, and it's certainly well-established, if you get into treatment early, you have a better chance of recovery than if you come in late. The longer you delay coming in to treatment, the worse the outcome. Treatments work: if you take the medications, they produce really quite rapid resolution, improvement in the symptoms, so the voices get less, they may disappear.

There is some research that people who have never had any treatment at all can recover from schizophrenia.

But the vast, vast bunch of evidence that we have is for medication, and I think again, just speaking purely personally, if a member of my family had the condition, I would want them to be treated. I might have a view about what drugs, but I would certainly think we have effective treatment, and I would want that to be used.