This is In Conversation from Apple News.

I'm Shemit Sabasu.

Today, can schizophrenia just go away?

When Christine was growing up in the early 2000s, she was extremely close to her mother.

Her mother was someone she found very gentle and compassionate.

That's New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv.

She describes her this sort of glowing, magical figure.

Christine's mother had been a physician in India before getting married, moving to the U.S.,

and having Christine and her younger sister, Angie.

Christine says she had a pretty typical childhood.

Until one day, her mother started having serious delusions.

She believed people were conspiring against her,

that she was being followed and filmed.

She would accuse Christine of poisoning her food.

She became increasingly unable to care for herself

and had to be forcibly hospitalized multiple times.

It felt to Christine like she had lost her mother

and she sort of became consumed by getting her back somehow.

Despite Christine's best efforts to find answers, for years no one could quite explain what was

happening to her mother. She was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, but treatments didn't help.

And for nearly two decades, her condition remained

essentially unchanged. Then when she was in her 50s, she was diagnosed with cancer and prescribed

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