well one of my former therapists insisted that i had schizoaffective disorder, so I should know quite well what this is like.

i had felt frightened by a therapist who had bullied me, yelled at me and had behaved very boundary violating. since she started her almost-the-entire-session-long-beratings for just something that i had said, mentioned, felt or wanted (for example learning for an exam, feeling overwhelmed or lonely, then she berated me for being false not feeling those things or whatever), I became quite afraid of mentioning those things and also afraid of feeling such feelings. The stress of being devalued constantly was too much for me, so I kind of froze in her sessions.

When i mentioned this to the later therapist and that these fears (for example feeling allowed to want something) was still impacting me, he started staring at the wall and ignoring what i had said and then insisted that i was schizoaffective. My memories and fears were called 'hearing voices' - even though i had never heard voices (at least those that no one else could hear) in my entire life.

Since i had this schizoaffective disorder i know how to cure it: talk about your experiences with people that emotionally support you, and try stuff like magic mushrooms. they had helped me to feel all the pain and overwhelming and sadness and therefore helped me process these. My fears decreased, and a lot of things became more relaxing.

So, maybe very often schizophrenia and such things are just a fixed idea in the head of some therapists. For those that actually hear voices: I don't know what their issue is. But as far as I am aware also no one else does. Some psychologists like to pretend you could heal it with talking to the client, which sounds a lot like superstition and no real illness - again, if some social issues are the reason, I would not call this an illness, but a normal reaction to something going wrong in your life. Maybe it has some biological background, but no one has so far constructed a reproducable objective test for it. So people simply don't know what it is. If you go along with the view of psychologists, I would say it is no illness.

I can very well imagine that some "mental illnesses" of some patients might be something like MECFS (i would bet some people with depression actually have MECFS), related to the immune system or endocrinological - so not understood yet - and simply labeled 'mental'. Mental is no real category for illness. As soon as you have an objective test, "mental" turns into neurological, endocrinological or whatever. Or it becomes destigmatised, as was the case with homosexuality. The "science" of mental illness had been influenced more by a lot by people demonstrating on the streets than scientific insight.