... patients with Parkinsons are typically treated so much better than people with schizophrenia diagnoses. The unfair discrimination is embedded in public health systems.
My take on this is it is probably inherent in the human psyche to develope a "theory of mind" in our attempt to understand the people around us.
So we may feel empathy with other people, especially kin but also others and part of the empathy is modelling what we know about them in an image of them retained in our memory, what some might call our "heart". The empathic recollection we have of other people has to be based on our own mental experience i.e. we use our own mind as a way to model other people's minds.
I think the difference between schizophrenia and Parkinson's in this context is that the affects of schizophrenia can be so cruel and deeply disturbing in their nature that it is very hard for anyone who has not experienced it to understand it through reflection on their own psyches. There is also an element of danger perceived to be attributable to schizophrenic people due to unpredictable and misdirected but energetic activity they are capable of, which other people including clinicians want to defend themselves from.
This is not the case with Parkinson's patients who are typically aged and have impaired movement indicating frailty and are not perceived as a threat because they are not strong.
With Parkinson's patients medics can afford to get straight to the issue of improving their situation but with schizophrenics there is the overriding priority of taming their dementia so they are not a danger to themselves or to others which dominates the way they are perceived and treated.
Also because Parkinson's primarily affects movement directly, it is readily perceived as pertaining to the body and control of movement rather than cognition.
With schizophrenia, delusions about the perceived world and consequent incomprehensible behaviour are the primary symptoms, so schizophrenia patients are conceived of has having an illness of cognition, meaning an illness of mind.
IMHO the way we model the mind is instinctively distinct from the way we understand the body because of the way our own brains are arranged which is in turn due to the way they evolved. Which is not exactly the reptile mind so much as the cauliflower mind, in that social awareness must have evolved as an extension of existing behaviour controlling neurological structures, akin to a floret on a metaphysical stalk i.e. distal from the core of our behaviour. Contemplation of mind also retains a distal characteristic because of the importance of physical self awareness and coordination of behaviour to human survival, meaning that physical behaviour has remained the top priority for human cognition and so ruminating on theories of mind is subordinate to the necessity for action because it takes too long in the middle of a fight and this is another reason the theory of mind is compartmentalised in a place apart from the control of the physical body. When adrenalin kicks in and so called fight or flight behaviour dominates, theories of mind are simplified down to enemy or ally so they can be processed expeditiously and reaction times improved. Schizophrenics tend to be seen as enemies because they invoke fear, whereas it is much easier to see a Parkinson's patient as an ally in need of help.
That is because of how we are as human beings and what others' distempers do to us at a cognitive level. So I feel the point I am trying to make is that mind body dualism is not something which will go away, though deep rumination can see inconsistencies in the way it affects our thinking and see through it, that is dependant on peaceful conditions around the thinker permitting such contemplations. Which is why cloistered monasteries developed, later becoming universities as this is the kind of protected environment we need to develope academically. Which is why I believe body mind dualism is intrinsic to the human psyche and can only be reconciled by accepting it as a permanent fixture and handling the conditions we create for ourselves appropriately in that context. If you see what I mean
