Part way through his senior year of high school, the visual distortions and auditory hallucinations that had been plaguing Adam Petrazelli culminate in a psychotic break in the middle of chemistry class that results in a fellow student getting severely burned.
Thus begins the agonizingly familiar drug cocktail trial-and-error as his treatment team tries to find an effective antipsychiotic that will mitigate his positive symptoms. When none prove effective, he is diagnosed as one of the roughly third of schizophrenics who are "treatment resistant." Out of desperation, his mother signs him up for a drug trial for an experimental new antipsychotic.