The fable “Carving the Boat to Seek the Sword” tells a small story with deep meaning: Long ago, a man from the state of Chu, who was crossing the river with his sword, accidentally dropped his sword into the river when the ferry boat was halfway through its journey. At this point, he did not immediately go into the water to look for his sword, but carved a mark on the side of the boat and pointed to it, saying, “This is where my sword fell. When the boat stopped on the other side, he jumped into the water according to the mark he had carved on the side of the boat to look for the sword, but he couldn’t find it. This fable is a metaphor for a person’s vision not keeping pace with the development of the objective world, and also a metaphor for being rigid, stubborn and not knowing how to adapt. Sometimes, I think of this story when answering some questions from patients. One is when a patient or family member asks me, “I’ve been treated for so long and I still haven’t recovered, is it incurable? The second is when a patient or family member asks me, “Is this attack different from the previous one, has it turned into schizophrenia or some other disease? I think such questions reflect the same way of thinking as that of the Chu man, who ignored the changes brought about by time and personal growth, i.e., he forgot the fact that time has changed. For such a question, I first emphasize the change or growth of the patient. Even with mental illness, the patient may be out of such an optimal environment for growth as a peer group, but he is still growing and changing: on the one hand, there is the development and maturation of somatic and physiological functions, which inevitably brings about growth and changes in corresponding abilities and ways of responding. On the other hand, there are changes in the level of psychological development or changes in the mind, and there will be corresponding changes in the perception and understanding of environmental things and people around. The last aspect is the change of living environment, which is called “this time and that time”, and also brings the corresponding influence to the sick individual. Moreover, there is an intricate interaction between these three factors, which may cause different changes in the patient’s condition. For example, a patient who is treated for the first time at the age of 20, regardless of the outcome, is “too young to know what it is like to be a teenager” and will not think about the problems he may face at the age of 30. If the patient has a poor outcome, serious impairment of social function, and his condition worsens at age 30, he may think of his peers who are now either successful in their careers or married with children, while he is troubled by the disease, his fate is unfortunate, and he has no success. Such anxiety will certainly cause an important difference between his disease manifestation and that of ten years ago. Secondly, I would also like to emphasize that the disease follows certain laws of its own and is in a constant process of change, which is caused by a variety of factors that interact with each other in an intricate way. There are biological factors as well as non-biological factors such as psychological and social and even family environment, which are also changing and interacting with each other over time. For example, during adolescence, dramatic changes in the endocrine hormones that dominate sexual maturation may affect emotional stability, and many women experience dramatic changes in progesterone and estrogen secretion levels a week or so before menstruation, causing them to become depressed, moody, and irritable. If such mood changes cause interpersonal conflicts, they may become a cause of stress and bring them new adjustment problems. Such a change brought about by physiological factors triggers psychological stress and complicates simple problems. Similarly, the developmental evolution of psychiatric disorders is influenced by these factors in the manifestation of the disease. For example, patients with overprotective or restrictive depressive episodes in childhood and adolescence may be able to tolerate their parents’ management and restriction in the early stages of the illness due to their own security deficits, and may seem to be more “compliant” and take medication as requested by their parents. As they grow up, they may show a strong tendency to seek personal independence. In this case, they will express their will to pursue personal independence by disobeying their parents’ wishes, including the request to follow medical advice to treat their illness. At this point, the manifestation of their mental illness on the one hand, and their resistance to parental demands on the other hand, are intertwined to form a complex clinical phenomenon that presents a completely different manifestation from the previous one. In addition, in most cases, the longer the duration of mental illness, the more severe the functional impairment, and the less standardized the treatment of previous episodes, the more complex and difficult to treat the clinical manifestations of relapse or deterioration of the illness thereafter. In these cases, it is easy to question whether the previous diagnosis is correct and whether the current treatment is reasonable. We should remember that human being is not a machine running at a constant speed in a constant temperature and humidity environment, but a most complex living organism with flesh and blood and soul living in an open natural and social environment with many changes and forms. Diseases are also changing processes that occur on top of this complex life form, and cannot be constant and unchanging, but can appear very unpredictable and even unrecognizable changes. For this reason, the development of medicine, especially psychiatry, is far from satisfactory. In a world that is not static, there will never be things that are static.