>>9946232A psychiatric disorder, first and foremost, since that's where the problematic symptoms rest. That's why you need a psychiatrist ( and usually aslo a therapist) to learn living with it and get appropriate meds to tone it down. Psychiatric diseases are usually hard to fit in such simple terms as a specific type of cancer, because nearly all of them exist on a spectrum, so therapy ( with drugs or otherwise ) has to be tuned to the specific patient. Some people with some forms of schizophrenia do not need drugs at all, they just need therapy and learn coping strategies, some don't even have psychotic episodes at all, some have only slight hallucinations but know those are not real, some primarily have affect disorders et cetera. it's a difficult family of maladies. That's why there's e.g. a debate in psychiatric circles wether bipolar disorders even exist and if those are not just schizophrenia ( since schizophrenia can have virtually identical symptoms), or wether you should classify something that is not based of of epileptic seizures as completely different... In general you could say "schizophrenia" as a label alone is way to unspecific to say "thats what medicine thinks". It's like talking to a doctor about an "infection" or "cancer" and wanting some explanation.
