Can Curcumin Help People with Schizophrenia?

Schizophrenia is a serious mental health condition. But it is often misunderstood and misrepresented. There is more to schizophrenia than hallucinations. And that’s where curcumin could come in.

The positive symptoms of schizophrenia, like hallucinations, grab all the attention in Hollywood. But they are only a part of the picture. There are also negative symptoms, like lack of ability to feel pleasure, loss of interest in activities and relationships, lack of motivation and lack of expression or emotion in the body, face or voice.

Positive symptoms are added mental features like hearing things; negative symptoms are missing mental features like lack of emotion. Negative symptoms are a common feature of schizophrenia, and they often persist even after treatment has improved the positive symptoms. There are no pharmaceutical treatments specifically for the negative symptoms of schizophrenia.

But there may be natural ones!

This new systematic review and meta-analysis of 4 controlled studies found that curcumin, though it did not affect positive symptoms, significantly reduced negative symptoms as well as general psychopathology.

And that is good news for people struggling with the difficult to treat symptoms of schizophrenia.

Psychiatric Quarterly. 2026;97:463–482.

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