Anosognosia - "lack of insight" or "lack of awareness" - is
believed to be the single largest reason why individuals with
schizophrenia and bipolar disorder do not take their
medications. A result of anatomical damage to the brain, it
affects approximately 50% of individuals with schizophrenia and
40% of individuals with bipolar disorder. When taking
medications, awareness of illness improves in some patients.
Impaired awareness of illness is a strange thing. To others,
psychiatric symptoms seem so obvious it’s hard to believe the
person experiencing them is not aware he/she is ill. Oliver
Sacks, in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, noted
this problem: "It is not only difficult, it is impossible for
patients with certain right-hemisphere syndromes to know their
own problems.... And it is singularly difficult, for even the
most sensitive observer, to picture the inner state, the
'situation' of such patients, for this is almost unimaginably
remote from anything he himself has ever known." Click h