Can Blind People Have Schizophrenia?
For over half of the century, scientists had no evidence for the comorbidity between schizophrenia and early blindness. Some medical experts even claim congenital blindness has a protective impact and prevents schizophrenia. Scientists believe that such a phenomenon occurs due to the sensual compensation that people with CB develop. They have advanced attention, memory, and scent, the senses typically lacking in schizophrenic patients. Although today, there are still no detected cases of diagnosed schizophrenia in people with congenital or early blindness, this doesn’t refer to the blind population who gained blindness or vision impairment in older age. Thus, blind patients with schizophrenia do exist, but mostly they are people who obtained blindness not due to congenital causes.
