Malaysia confronts complexities of schizophrenia after school killing ruling

When Cindi suffered her first severe psychotic episode a decade ago, she could no longer tell where reality ended and what her mind had created began.

“My reality and fantasy [were] all distorted. I had no idea what was real, what was not,” the 38-year-old, who asked to be identified only by her first name, told This Week in Asia.

“It was so severe to the point that I couldn’t even recognise my own family members. My mother was there, my brother was there, but they didn’t feel like my mother or my brother.”

Her experience has taken on new resonance in Malaysia after a court acquitted a 15-year-old boy of murdering his schoolmate Yap Shing Xuen, 16, on the grounds that severe schizophrenia had left him legally insane when he killed her at their school in Bandar Utama, outside Kuala Lumpur, last October.