ABSTRACT
People with schizophrenia are much more likely to live with their own families in some cultures than in others. A study by the author and his colleagues (Warner et al., 1998), for example, found that over 70 per cent of a large sample of people with schizophrenia in treatment with the public mental health system in Bologna, Italy, were living with their family, compared to 17 per cent of a similar (predominantly Anglo-American) sample in Boulder, Colorado. Elsewhere in Italy it is common for a large proportion of people with schizophrenia to live with family; for example, 64 per cent of a sample in Verona (Faccincani et al., 1990) and 84 per cent in Genova (Marinoni et al., 1996). Within the US there is a wide variation between cultural groups; in a sample of people with schizophrenia in Ohio, 40 per cent of the Euro-Americans were living with a key relative, compared to 85 per cent of Latino patients (Jenkins and Schumacher, 1999).
