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Psychiatric medication, in the opinions of many psychiatrists, is the primary, often only response to a mental illness, especially in the case of schizophrenia. For many of psychiatrists, this is a very well-defined thing. They believe that most mental illnesses are produced by brain malfunctions. It follows that you must do something medical to modify the brain, and thus address the problem.

And, to a large extent, they have a point. You can't think your mental illness out of existence. You can't cure mental illness with meditation. You can't address it with exercise. (If you run ten miles a day hoping that it fixes the problem, you will be physically very fit, and you will also be psychotic.)

In a mental health treatment venue, particularly a psychiatric ward, doctors will try the cheapest, easiest, most effective way toward solving a problem, a remedy that works quickly and has easily observable results. Medication, in most instances, is all the above. For decades, or even centuries, there were no known effective treatments that could help severely mentally ill people. Patients were locked away under cruel conditions, and little or nothing was done, could be done, to get them back to a semblance of a normal state of mind. 

In the beginnings of psychiatry, there was the shameful practice of frontal lobotomies. Antipsychotics replaced that. This was a very good replacement. 

(One could imagine that prior to "insane asylums" mentally ill people could end up as "the town crazy," "the town idiot" or "the town drunk." Or, the person could be diagnosed by a doctor with something, and they might wander off and die. I frankly don't know, as I am not a historian and I wasn't here yet.) 

(Abraham Lincoln apparently suffered from a mental illness at some point in his life. Some people were able to recover without any modern treatment.) 

Now that I have described psychiatrists and why they medicate, I'd like to discuss mindfulness, which is potentially a great adjunct to medication. Mindfulness will not address the underlying neurobiological issues that lead to becoming psychotic. Mindfulness is more of a software fix, even though it can, to an extent, improve brain structure--at least, at a guess. 

Over a period of more than thirty years, I've been working at identifying and negating delusional thoughts. This anti-delusional mindfulness is a very substantial realm. The ability to identify and pinpoint a delusion requires a higher faculty. Medication usually doesn't block this faculty. 

(Insofar as medications that block the mind, the worst I've taken is Trazodone. Trazodone isn't even an antipsychotic; it is a heavily sedating antidepressant left over from the stone age of psychiatric treatment. Many people swear by Trazodone and believe it is great for them. This is because different people respond differently to a given medication. One can't say definitively that a particular drug is good or bad for a person--they all vary from person to person.) 

On Prolixin, which I took for decades, I was able to learn a lot about my mind. I learned which types of thoughts were questionable. I also learned to tap into additional areas of cognition. The intuitive mind, and also the grounded mind, are two areas of thought, or perhaps two mental states, in which a common-sense grasp of reality can often be found. 

As I got older, the Prolixin didn't work anymore. I've switched to mainly Olanzapine, plus a "first generation" antipsychotic that I take in addition to that. On Olanzapine, care must be taken to avoid weight gain and diabetes. Diet may have to be restricted. You should avoid drive thru food, avoid pizza, avoid cake, and avoid candy. I still get a package of ice cream once a month. 

Identifying a delusion can be done by examining the characteristics of the thought. In order to be able to do something like that, an internal sense must be available. Having an internal sense, the ability to look inside yourself and see what's there, may need to be developed over a period of years. Short of that, pen or pencil and paper can help. If you write out your thoughts, this is a manual method of having an internal sense. Once a thought is written, you could have a checklist to compare the thought. 

You need to decide what characteristics your questionable thoughts have. If the thought makes you important, if it is a conspiracy theory, or if it involves not taking things at face value, these are all red flags. You could conveniently do this on an Excel database, but I do not suggest that! Computers are not appropriate for storing personal material. 

When a thought has been identified as probably being a delusion, the next step is that of negating the thought. This is as simple as deciding it isn't real. 

Sometimes people with psychosis are attached to their delusions--and letting go of them is emotionally difficult. This is a characteristic of the illness. Mindfulness helps address this issue. This involves another area of practice. This is where "attainment" in which a meditation practitioner does not cling to things excessively, comes in handy. Achieving that requires a lot of effort at meditation over a period of years or even decades. Yet, this is a worthy pursuit. 

Mindfulness, whether it is aimed at pinpointing and deprogramming delusions, or at reducing the amount of "clinging" we experience, while they both help alleviate some of the symptoms, do not eliminate the need for conventional treatment. However, mindfulness can help us grapple with the absurd injustices of life. Mindfulness can help us learn to like ourselves, even when we have an apparent brain defect. Mindfulness can help us deal with the social injustices that come with being mentally ill. Mindfulness can help us calm down in situations that even non-afflicted people would find to be very hard. 

The best time to start looking toward mindfulness is when you are young. When you start young, the practices become incorporated in your mind more, the older you get. This will pay off big time, in the long term. This is because you can get past many of your supposed behavior problems and past many of your apparent emotional hurdles. 

Mindfulness is worth doing, even though it can be time consuming. It is important that you stay on task with it, so that your sessions do not deteriorate into sitting in a symptomatic daze. That is one reason that many meditation practitioners like to meditate among others who are doing the same thing. But if that is not an option, you could develop a system for remaining on task. 

I suggest reading books by Ram Dass, Thich Nhat Hanh, and D.T. Suzuki. There is also the book that I wrote, but it is doubtful that mine is as good as those of the above-mentioned great spiritual teachers.