1. How do you distinguish between psychosis and schizophrenia? Psychosis is a group of severe mental disorders that can cause social dysfunction and reduced ability to test reality. The clinical phase is mostly characterized by hallucinations and delusions, and the duration of the disease varies, with some patients experiencing lasting functional impairment. Among this group of disorders, the most common are schizophrenia, paranoid psychosis, and acute transient psychosis. Psychiatrists refer to the group of clinical symptoms with hallucinations and delusions as prominent manifestations as psychotic disorders, which encompasses schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a group of psychiatric disorders of unknown etiology with multiple disorders of thought, emotion, and behavior, characterized by incoordination of mental activity and environment. They are usually conscious and have fair intelligence, and some patients may have impaired cognitive function. Most of them start in young adults, often with a slow onset and prolonged course, with a tendency to chronicity and the possibility of decline, but some patients can remain cured or basically cured. 2. How many schizophrenics are there in reality? Schizophrenia can be found in all social cultures and all social classes. The lifetime prevalence in the adult population is about 1%. However, the prevalence can vary greatly in different parts of the world, for example, up to 17.4 per 1,000 in Ireland and only 0.9 per 1,000 in Tonga, an island nation in the Pacific. Overall, the average prevalence in developing countries is lower than that in developed countries. In addition to geographic, ethnic, and cultural factors, inconsistencies in the adoption and mastery of diagnostic criteria are also quite important reasons for such differences. The peak onset of schizophrenia is concentrated in the early adult age group: 15 to 25 years for men and slightly later for women. The chronic course of schizophrenia leads to a gradual disengagement from normal life and a personal life of suffering and chaos. Fifty percent of patients have attempted suicide, and 10% eventually die by suicide. In addition, patients with schizophrenia are more likely to suffer from unintentional injuries than the general population and have a shorter average life expectancy. The 1993 National Epidemiological Survey showed that the lifetime prevalence of schizophrenia was 6.55 per 1,000. Most of the data in China suggest that the prevalence of schizophrenia is higher in women than in men, and the gender difference is more pronounced in the age group above 35 years; the prevalence is higher in urban than in rural areas. It was also found that the prevalence of schizophrenia was negatively correlated with household economic level in both urban and rural areas. Nearly 7 million people currently suffer from schizophrenia in China. The resulting annual medical expenses and the loss of labor productivity of patients and their families are staggering.