When you add up the direct costs of treating patients with schizophrenia, it is a staggering number: $22 billion in the United States alone. As effective as many of them are, antipsychotic drugs are costly, and many have significant side effects. We detail the history of these medications on the following pages. Effective antipsychotics remain a critical avenue of research, and we also take a look at drug candidates in the pipeline.

Of course, drugs are not enough. Those with schizophrenia need intensive social supports. As Jeffrey Lieberman, chair of Columbia University's department of psychiatry, puts it in the last story in this section, recovering from schizophrenia is a bit like being rescued from an island years after being shipwrecked. "You've been away for a long time and you're now coming back. People have to get reacclimated and reoriented and they need help in doing so." That's where programs like New York City's Fountain House, highlighted here and in our first section, come in. They offer everything from support groups to 6:30 a.m. wake-up calls to get people out to jobs.

We hope that clinicians, scientists, and policymakers consider this entire supplement a wake-up call to spur the field forward.