A young female patient pushed her way in, followed by her mother who showed her head at the door to greet me. “So, you talk to the doctor first?” After getting her daughter’s permission, she backed out. ”I discussed it with her. Didn’t want her to be present.” The female patient (let’s call her M for now) said this as soon as she sat down. M, 37, was diagnosed with “schizophrenia” by several hospitals 20 years ago. In 2005, when her mother thought that M’s condition had not been “completely cured”, she took the initiative to try to switch to “risperidone” and “ziprasidone”. In 2005, my mother thought that M’s condition had never been “completely cured”, so she took the initiative to find a doctor to try to switch to “risperidone” and “ziprasidone”, and also added many antidepressants. In the past two years, M has been washing his hands repeatedly, which doctors believe is a manifestation of “obsessive-compulsive disorder”, and after taking the medication, the number of times and duration of washing hands have been significantly reduced. Her mother thinks she is not completely cured, “Doctor, why do you think she can’t change? The conversation with M was relatively “easy”. The long course of the disease had consumed a significant portion of her thinking and emotions. This has limited her life and made our conversation more of a “one way street”. Like an interviewer, I tried to dig out from M’s short answers the interests and experiences that shone through her from time to time, despite being damaged by the disease. She said that she often climbed Mount Xiangshan, and when she met “mountain friends” (a new word she explained to me), she wanted to talk to them, but each time her mother stopped her, saying “they might be bad people. When I asked her how she knew the word “mountain friends”, she smiled dully, “I heard about it on TV”. Without pausing, she added, “There are dogs in the neighborhood”. I know she thinks fast, so I asked her if she likes small animals. She said yes, she can wag her tail. Although this “humor” was not intentional, the look on her face when talking about the dog conveyed the “happy part” of her emotions. Although it was short-lived and incomplete. After the conversation, M insisted on picking up the medicine herself and said she didn’t need her mother’s help. When M left, her mother came in and, after a few minutes, began to say, “I’d like to discuss her diagnosis with you.” M’s mother had a head full of white hair, and her wrinkled forehead showed up under her sparse bangs, making people immediately think of the word “sadness”. Without waiting for me to nod, she already began to state her observations and conclusions. “M did have hallucinations and delusions of victimization at first; but strangely enough, she hasn’t had any more hallucinations over the years. I’ve heard that it’s basically a relapse, so that’s not very likely. I still think she is just anxious and obsessive. She doesn’t listen to me, she says what I say, and she is paranoid. There is also poor comprehension, can not think differently.” I can’t remember how many times I’ve had this kind of conversation in the six months that M has been in my clinic, since her parents divorced six months before her illness and M has been with her mother ever since. While the two were dependent on each other, her mother always felt that the diagnosis was unclear all these years, “I just can’t accept that she is schizophrenic”. I just can’t accept that she is a schizophrenic.” For her mother, it was more than just a “diagnosis” that was difficult to accept. It seems that in M’s mother’s dictionary, accepting M’s “bad” is “surrendering to the disease,” denying M’s “bad” is “not giving up the fight against the disease. To deny M’s “bad” means “not giving up the fight against the disease”, while to change M’s “bad” means “loving her”. As a direct result, their relationship was like a twist, almost daily, tightening and loosening. Mother thinks M is rebellious and does not want to listen to her; M thinks mother always says she is bad and does not want to listen to her. Mother thinks M has poor understanding and M thinks she is too paranoid. Every time the quarrel came to this point of mutual evaluation, mother would cry a lot. Thinking about all the years of hard work, she felt: very aggrieved. I don’t know, how much can M appreciate her mother’s aggravation and sorrow? I also don’t know how much of M’s imperfection and effort can my mother appreciate? But I do know how hard it is to get my mother to accept M completely, and how much harder it is to get M to accept my mother’s “non-acceptance” ……