DAVID ALWAYS had a social conscience. As a child he was described as being sensitive, clever, but “a bit odd”. When he grew up he went off to a well-respected overseas university, but although bright, he lacked social skills and overcame his shyness by relying on cannabis.

One day, after a period when his fellow students had noticed increasingly bizarre behaviour, he flagged down a police car, because he believed that aliens were attacking the Earth and had chosen the university as their initial target. His social conscience demanded that he should warn his fellow earthlings. The police listened attentively, asked him to make a statement at the station but drove him straight to hospital. After treatment he made a reasonable recovery.

Recovery from such a mental illness is rarely absolute and is relative to the individual — what matters is that the patient should be reintegrated into society and the patient should learn to live a rewarding life despite the illness.

David never returned to academia and never held a nine-to-five job, but is a gifted part-time photographer (his pictures are both original and good), and a freelance musician.

His story is not uncommon. Nationally, one person in a hundred has frank schizophrenia and can be described as psychotic, but often relations carry similar genes and exhibit lesser symptoms. Many of these people show exceptional intellectual or artistic ability.

This week the Schizophrenia Reintegration Awards, sponsored by Lilly and supported by Rethink — until recently known as the NSF, the National Schizophrenia Fellowship — and the Zito Trust, were presented at the annual ceremony in London. One of, if not the greatest, of the problems in treating schizophrenia is the reintegration — now fashionably known in medical, as well as political, circles as the inclusion — of patients into their family and local community once they have recovered to a greater, or lesser, extent from their acute episode.

The award for this year’s best entry went to the Goldenhill Resource Centre from Clydebank, Scotland. It was made for the success of their innovative project which aimed to provide a service for parents with severe chronic mental illness. It was designed to enable them to be valued as parents — and not just regarded as patients — so that the importance of their parenting role could be recognised by their family and society. There is always the danger that their disease could be so stigmatising that their efforts to be good mothers or fathers were belittled or disregarded. The parents are encouraged to discuss all the issues of parenting within the group and with its advisers, and the group works closely with other agencies such as childcare, social work and mental health teams so that all the support services are utilised to keep the families together and the affected parent a useful and participating member of the family team.

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