My aunt visits my mother once a year for a few months, and whenever I ask my mother how my aunt is doing, my mother has only one thing to say — that my aunt is not okay.

My aunt was diagnosed with schizophrenia about 20 years ago. She saw her first psychiatrist two years after the first symptoms appeared. The first psychiatrist incorrectly diagnosed her with depression and put her on medication to treat depression. Even when my aunt was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia and was given the right medication, she’d keep getting worse. Although there are several reasons for my aunt’s current state, I keep thinking about the importance of early diagnosis in treating mental disorders, especially when I think of the difference an early diagnosis would have made on my aunt.

Hopefully a proper diagnosis today includes neuropsychological testing because Harvey et al. (2001) found that clinical rating scales are not reliable alternatives to neuropsychological tests for schizophrenia, regardless of whether they test positive or negative symptoms of schizophrenia. In specific, they found that though the correlations were statistically significant between cognitive impairments measured using clinical rating scales and neuropsychological tests, the overlapping variance was small. Therefore these neuropsychological tests that measure cognitive impairments like poor attention, memory and verbal fluency common in schizophrenic patients, are an additional support to clinical rating scales.

Research on schizophrenia and its symptoms has also focused on eye tracking studies. Benson and St. Clair (2012) found that schizophrenic patients were abnormal compared to healthy subjects when tested on three types of eye tests. This study is promising, especially if it means that it can help in a quicker diagnosis of schizophrenia in patients. Even if it is time consuming and expensive to administer, I think neuropsychological tests need to be included in clinical diagnoses of mental disorders like schizophrenia.