The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is routinely cited as the reason physicians cannot share critical medical information about patients’ condition, even when doing so could save the life of the patient or others. However, this is only one of the many factors that interfere with appropriate communication among all of people trying to help patients remain safe and well. The result of these various factors for families of people with schizophrenia is a devastating lack of ability to care for people, some of whom, realistically lack the capacity to care for themselves. The heart of the matter is that people with schizophrenia retain their right to make decisions, even when their illness may result in behaviors that are based on false beliefs, false sensory experiences and a fundamental lack of insight. Clinicians who treat schizophrenia patients are all too familiar with the daily experience of watching a patient discontinue care due to lack of insight, coupled with persistence or exacerbation of symptoms. Under these circumstances, the patient becomes increasingly disorganized, disconnected from society and in many cases dangerous. Worse yet, this cyclic pattern of disengagement, followed by deterioration, leading to hospitalization and recovery is often highly predicable. Yet, even under these circumstances, it is practically impossible to reach out and take benevolent control of the individual's choices until they have already demonstrated a clear and present danger. The same would not be true for any other form of medically-induced disruption of brain function. Rather, a patient with encephalitis or brain malignancy that alters their capacity to make rational decisions would be cared for by surrogate decisions makers until such time that they could responsibly make their own choices. The three cases noted below illustrate how this dichotomy between so-called “organic” brain disorders and schizophrenia should be abolished. A more civilized and humane system would require that physicians, family members and governing bodies provide benevolent intervention to care for symptomatic schizophrenia patients long before they either harm themselves or someone else. Each of the cases is true, although demographic details have been sufficiently altered to protect the privacy of the patients and their families.