South Africa: Robots, Polony and the Long Road to Recovery From Schizophrenia

Could robots, polony sandwiches and peer support help people with schizophrenia stay out of hospital? An Eastern Cape study suggests that community recovery groups could be part of the answer. But keeping them going is another matter when people can't even afford food.

After the depression set in, after the schizophrenia diagnosis came, the brothers would go to the hospital by taxi. But first they had to get to the taxi stop. This is where the seemingly simple became complicated.

They would leave their home on the outskirts of Gqeberha, after Phumelele Ngalo already spent far too much time convincing his sibling to get dressed and bathed, and about halfway there, Lithemba would stop, refusing to move, just staring at his brother. Not so much defiant as disappeared.

"And then I'll say, 'Bana, come on, let's go,"' Phumelele explains how he would eventually snap, exasperated. "Then I would have to go back and take him by his hand, and we would go to the taxi together. Even when we got into the hospital, in the waiting room, he would stand up and go and sit on another seat. And I'm like, why can't you just be steady? Why can't you just sit next to me? You know, so it's all those kinds of things."

Phumelele, who is now 37, has been the main caregiver for Lithemba for the past 10 years. That was when schizophrenia was officially named by the doctor, which was...