Due to the specific characteristics of the disease, schizophrenia is considered the most costly psychiatric condition. However, there is surprising ignorance about how high the costs of community-based care for patients with schizophrenia are, how these costs are composed, and what consequences arise from them. It is more than overdue for psychiatric care research to address this issue and to produce empirically validated findings on the costs of treating chronically mentally ill patients. There is a significant deficit in this area compared to countries with comparable care standards. This work is intended as an attempt to close this gap.