Where did the word schizophrenia come from?
History of schizophrenia
The word "schizophrenia"—which translates roughly as "splitting of the mind" and comes from the Greek roots "schizein" (σχίζειν, "to split") and "phrēn", "phren-" (φρήν, φρεν-, "mind")—was coined by Eugen Bleuler in 1908 and was intended to describe the separation of function between personality, thinking, memory, and perception. Bleuler described the main symptoms as four "A"'s: flattened "Affect", "Autism", impaired "Association" of ideas and "Ambivalence". Bleuler realized that the illness was not a dementia as some of his patients improved rather than deteriorated and hence proposed the term "schizophrenia" instead. However, many at the time did not accept that splitting or dissociation was an appropriate description, and the term would later have more significance as a source of confusion and social stigma than scientific meaning.
History of schizophrenia
Kraepelin's classification slowly gained acceptance. There were objections to the use of the term "dementia" despite cases of recovery, and some defence of diagnoses it replaced such as adolescent insanity. The concept of adolescent insanity or developmental insanity had been advanced by Scottish psychiatrist Sir Thomas Clouston in 1873, describing a psychotic condition which generally afflicted those aged 18–24 years, particularly males, and in 30% of cases proceeded to ‘a secondary dementia’.
Schizophrenia (disambiguation)
Schizophrenia may also refer to:
Social construction of schizophrenia
"By changing the name, consumers with the symptoms of what actually may be a spectrum of disorders would have a more accurate and descriptive name attached to their diagnosis. Ideally, they would also experience less stigma, as they left behind a name with Greek origins that roughly translates to “shattered mind” and which is often used in popular culture to mean "multiple personality disorder" or "split personality.".
Sluggish schizophrenia
Sluggish schizophrenia or slow progressive schizophrenia (, "vyalotekushchaya shizofreniya") was a diagnostic category used in the Soviet Union to describe what they claimed was a form of schizophrenia characterized by a slowly progressive course; it was diagnosed even in a patient who showed no symptoms of schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders, on the assumption that these symptoms would appear later. It was developed in the 1960s by Soviet psychiatrist Andrei Snezhnevsky and his colleagues, and was used exclusively in the USSR and several Eastern Bloc countries, until the fall of Communism starting in 1989. The diagnosis has long been discredited because of its scientific inadequacy and its use as a means of confining dissenters. It has never been used or recognized outside of Soviet Union, or by international organizations such as the World Health Organization. It is considered a prime example of the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union.
Andrei Snezhnevsky
Andrei Vladimirovich Snezhnevsky (; , Kostroma – 12 July 1987, Moscow) was a Soviet psychiatrist whose name was lent to the unbridled broadening of the diagnostic borders of schizophrenia in the Soviet Union, the key architect of the Soviet concept of sluggish schizophrenia, the inventor of the term "sluggish schizophrenia", an embodier of history of repressive psychiatry, and a direct participant in psychiatric repression against dissidents. He was an academician of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, the director of the Serbsky Institute for Forensic Psychiatry (1950—1951), the director of the Institute of Psychiatry of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences (1962—1987), and the director of the All-Union Mental Health Research Center of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences (1982—1987).
Andrei Snezhnevsky
In 1968, Snezhnevsky wrote of a distinction between the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia, a concept long attributed to Snezhnevky but in fact introduced by John Hughlings Jackson and John Russell Reynolds. The concept came to be increasingly used in schizophrenia research and classification since 1970's, citing his colleague I.F. Ovchinnikov that the symptoms appear to exist "as if on two levels".
Orthomolecular psychiatry
"Pyroluria" (or "malvaria" from the term "mauve factor") involves hypothetical excessive levels of pyrroles in the body resulting from improper hemoglobin synthesis. Carl Pfeiffer believed that pyroluria is a form of schizophrenic porphyria, similar to acute intermittent porphyria where both pyrroles and porphyrins are excreted in the human urine to an excessive degree. and orthomolecular psychiatrists have alleged that pyroluria is related to diagnoses of ADHD, alcoholism, autism, depression, down syndrome, manic-depression, schizophrenia, celiac disease, epilepsy, and psychosis. Pfeiffer's methods have not been rigorously tested, and pyrroles are not considered to be related to schizophrenia. Studies have either failed to detect hemopyrrole and kryptopyrrole in the urine of normal controls and schizophrenics, or found no correlation between these chemicals and mental illness. Few, if any, medical experts regard the condition as genuine, and few or no articles on pyroluria are found in modern medical literature; the approach is described as "snake oil" by pediatrician and author Julian Haber.
Dementia praecox
Schizophrenia was mentioned as an alternate term for dementia praecox in the 1918 "Statistical Manual". In both clinical work as well as research, between 1918 and 1952 five different terms were used interchangeably: dementia praecox, schizophrenia, dementia praecox (schizophrenia), schizophrenia (dementia praecox) and schizophrenic reaction. This made the psychiatric literature of the time confusing since, in a strict sense, Kraepelin's disease was not Bleuler's disease. They were defined differently, had different population parameters, and different concepts of prognosis.
Louis Wain
The onset of Wain's schizophrenia may have been precipitated by "Toxoplasma gondii", a parasite which is excreted by cats in their faeces. The theory that toxoplasmosis can trigger schizophrenia is the subject of ongoing research, though the origins of the theory can be traced back as early as 1953.
Eugen Bleuler
Bleuler wrote in 1911: "When the disease process flares up, it is more correct, in my view, to talk in terms of deteriorating attacks, rather than its recurrence. Of course the term recurrence is more comforting to a patient and his relatives than the notion of progressively deteriorating attacks." (See Noll, "American Madness", pages 236–242.) The eugenic sterilization of persons diagnosed with (and viewed as predisposed to) schizophrenia was advocated by Bleuler. He argued that racial deterioration would result from the propagation of mental and physical cripples in his "Textbook of Psychiatry":
He believed the disease's central characteristics to be the product of a process of splitting between the emotional and the intellectual functions of the personality. He favoured early discharge from hospital into a community environment to avoid institutionalisation.
Humphry Osmond
At Weyburn, Osmond recruited a group of research psychologists to turn the hospital into a design-research laboratory. There, he conducted a wide variety of patient studies and observations using hallucinogenic drugs, collaborating with Abram Hoffer and others. In 1952, Osmond related the similarity of mescaline to adrenaline molecules, in a theory which implied that schizophrenia might be a form of self-intoxication caused by one's own body. He collected the biographies of recovered schizophrenics, and he held that psychiatrists can only understand the schizophrenic by understanding the rational way the mind makes sense of distorted perceptions. He pursued this idea with passion, exploring all avenues to gain insight into the shattered perceptions of schizophrenia, holding that the illness arises primarily from distortions of perception. Yet during the same period, Osmond became aware of the potential of psychedelics to foster mind-expanding and mystical experiences.
Social construction of schizophrenia
Schizophrenia in America is a medical diagnostic category, which in the 1970s was primarily termed differentiated and undifferentiated schizophrenia; international leaders such as R.D. Laing in Europe offered professional expertise in serving this population group. In the context of community mental health services, the broad term mental health also referred to individuals who may have this diagnosis, which may or may not be considered to be valid or relevant. The word schizophrenia is often associated with a "major mental breakdown" in common parlance which may result in the need for psychotherapy, mental health counseling, person-centered therapy, or community support services.
Cognitive slippage
In 1962, Paul E. Meehl emphasized that Thought disorder was a critical component of schizophrenia diagnosis. He coined the term "cognitive slippage" to describe a more mild form of thought disorder that he believed was still relevant. He recognized that even in the absence of more severe forms of thought disorder, individuals with schizophrenia exhibited more cognitive slippage than non-schizophrenic individuals. As a result, Meehl deemed thought disorder a necessary component of the disorder for diagnoses, regardless of severity. He declared that any characterization of either schizophrenia or schizotypy that lacked cognitive slippage as a component was unacceptable and he insisted that cognitive slippage, interpersonal aversiveness, anhedonia, and ambivalence were the universal "core behavior traits" of all schizotypic individuals. He also noted that the amount of slippage can vary from case to case, with some highly anxious individuals exhibiting less slippage than some minimally anxious individuals. This suggests that cognitive slippage may be affected by altering the affect of the individual, but Meehl mentions that this feature is not groundbreaking or unique to cognitive slippage.
Social construction of schizophrenia
Charities that disagree with the notion of the schizophrenia label in the U.K. include Mind (charity) and Rethink. Mind state on their website "Because of differences of opinion about schizophrenia, it's not easy to identify what might cause it." Mind have previously published an explanatory leaflet, prefaced by Michael Palin that gives a definition of schizophrenia as people 'who think outside the normal range of human experience'. The National Alliance on Mental Illness says:
Schizoaffective disorder
A core concept in modern psychiatry since DSM-III was released in 1980, is the categorical separation of mood disorders from schizophrenia, known as the Kraepelinian dichotomy. Emil Kraepelin introduced the idea that schizophrenia was separate from mood disorders after observing patients with symptoms of psychosis and mood disorder, over a century ago, in 1898. This was a time before genetics were known and before any treatments existed for mental illness. The Kraepelinian dichotomy wasn't used for DSM-I and DSM-II because both manuals were influenced by the dominant psychodynamic psychiatry of the time, but the designers of DSM-III wanted to use more scientific and biological definitions. Consequently, they looked to psychiatry's history and decided to use the Kraepelinian dichotomy as a foundation for the classification system.
Schizophrenia
In the United States, the cost of schizophrenia—including direct costs (outpatient, inpatient, drugs, and long-term care) and non-health care costs (law enforcement, reduced workplace productivity, and unemployment)—was estimated to be $62.7 billion in 2002. The book and film "A Beautiful Mind" chronicles the life of John Forbes Nash, a mathematician who won the Nobel Prize for Economics and was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Epigenetics of schizophrenia
Historically, schizophrenia has been studied and examined through different paradigms, or schools of thought. In the late 1870s, Emil Kraepelin started the idea of studying it as an illness. Another paradigm, introduced by Zubin and Spring in 1977, was the stress-vulnerability model where the individual has unique characteristics that give him or her strengths or vulnerabilities to deal with stress, a predisposition for schizophrenia. More recently, with the decoding of the human genome, there had been a focus on identifying specific genes to study the disease. However, the genetics paradigm faced problems with inconsistent, inconclusive, and variable results. The most recent school of thought is studying schizophrenia through epigenetics.
Drift hypothesis
A study by E. M. Goldberg and S. L. Morrison looked at the relationship between schizophrenia and social class. They wanted to find out if men, before they had been admitted to a mental hospital, drifted down the occupational scale to unskilled jobs because of their developing illness, or if it was because they were born into families with a lower social class attainment, that they developed their mental illness. They looked at men who had their first admission in a mental hospital between the ages of 25–34. They also looked at their fathers' occupation, in order to see if the social class they grew up in played a role in the development of schizophrenia. They found the men had grown up in families whose social class was similar to the general population. So the social class they grew up in did not seem to be a contributor to the development of their schizophrenia.
Psychedelia
The term was first coined as a noun in 1956 by psychiatrist Humphry Osmond as an alternative descriptor for hallucinogenic drugs in the context of psychedelic psychotherapy. Seeking a name for the experience induced by LSD, Osmond contacted Aldous Huxley, a personal acquaintance and advocate for the therapeutic use of the substance. Huxley coined the term "phanerothyme," from the Greek terms for "manifest" (φανερός) and "spirit" (θύμος). In a letter to Osmond, he wrote:
To which Osmond responded:
It was on this term that Osmond eventually settled, because it was "clear, euphonious and uncontaminated by other associations." This mongrel spelling of the word 'psychedelic' was loathed by American ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, but championed by Timothy Leary, who thought it sounded better. Due to the expanded use of the term "psychedelic" in pop culture and a perceived incorrect verbal formulation, Carl A.P. Ruck, Jeremy Bigwood, Danny Staples, Jonathan Ott, and R. Gordon Wasson proposed the term "entheogen" to describe the religious or spiritual experience produced by such substances.
History of mental disorders
Clear descriptions of some syndromes, such as the condition that would later be termed schizophrenia, have been identified as relatively rare prior to the 19th century, although interpretations of the evidence and its implications are inconsistent.
Bicameralism (psychology)
Jaynes notes that even at the time of publication there is no consensus as to the cause or origins of schizophrenia. Jaynes argues that schizophrenia is a vestige of humanity's earlier bicameral state. Recent evidence shows that many schizophrenics do not just hear random voices but experience "command hallucinations" instructing their behavior or urging them to commit certain acts.
Sluggish schizophrenia
According to the Global Initiative on Psychiatry chief executive Robert van Voren, the political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR arose from the concept that people who opposed the Soviet regime were mentally ill (since there was no logical reason to oppose the sociopolitical system considered the best in the world). The diagnosis of sluggish schizophrenia furnished a framework for explaining this behavior. This seemed to many Soviet psychiatrists a logical explanation for why someone would be willing to abandon his happiness, family, and career for a conviction so different from what most individuals seemed to believe.
Sluggish schizophrenia
Psychiatric diagnoses such as sluggish schizophrenia were used in the USSR for political purposes; the diagnosis of sluggish schizophrenia was most frequently used for Soviet dissidents. Sluggish schizophrenia as a diagnostic category was created to facilitate the stifling of dissidents and was a root of self-deception among psychiatrists to placate their consciences when the doctors acted as a tool of oppression in the name of a political system. American psychiatrist Peter Breggin points out that the term “sluggish schizophrenia” was created to justify involuntary treatment of political dissidents with drugs normally used for psychiatric patients.
Trauma model of mental disorders
From the 1940s to the 1970s prominent mental health professionals proposed trauma models as a means of understanding schizophrenia, including Harry Stack Sullivan, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Theodore Lidz, Gregory Bateson, Silvano Arieti and R.D. Laing. Based on their clinical work they theorised that schizophrenia appears to be induced by children's experiences in profoundly disturbed families and reflect victims attempts to cope with such families and live in societies that are inherently damaging to people's psychological well-being. In the 1950s Sullivan's theory that schizophrenia is related to interpersonal relationships was widely accepted in the United States. Silvano Arieti's book "Interpretation of Schizophrenia" won the American National Book Award in the field of science in 1975. The book advances a psychological model for understanding all the regressive types of the disorder.
Psychedelic drug
The term "psychedelic" is derived from the Greek words ψυχή ("psyche", "soul, mind") and δηλείν ("delein", "to manifest"), hence "soul-manifesting", the implication being that psychedelics can access the soul and develop unused potentials of the human mind. The word was coined in 1956 by British psychiatrist, Humphry Osmond, the spelling loathed by American ethnobotanist, Richard Schultes, but championed by the American psychologist, Timothy Leary.
Timeline of psychiatry
The term "Schizophrenia" was coined by Swiss psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler.
History of schizophrenia
Accounts of a schizophrenia-like syndrome are thought to be rare in the historical record prior to the 19th century, although reports of irrational, unintelligible, or uncontrolled behavior were common. There has been an interpretation that brief notes in the Ancient Egyptian Ebers papyrus may imply schizophrenia, but other reviews have not suggested any connection. A review of ancient Greek and Roman literature indicated that although psychosis was described, there was no account of a condition meeting the criteria for schizophrenia.
Magnocellular cell
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder in which people are unable to differentiate what is real and what is not. It is believed that the magnocellular pathway may help with facial recognition and discrimination in children, but when this pathway is not developed completely or correctly, facial processing is more difficult for individuals later in life. This is seen in people with schizophrenia and occurs when there are issues in the integration of information from the M cell and P cell pathways, making it difficult for individuals with schizophrenia to differentiate between reality and hallucinations.
Cognitive epidemiology
Schizophrenia is chronic and disabling mental illness that is characterized by abnormal behavior, psychotic episodes and inability to recognize between reality and fantasy. Even though schizophrenia can severely handicap its sufferers, there has been a great interest in the relationship of this disorder and intelligence. Interest in the association of intelligence and schizophrenia has been widespread partly stems from the perceived connection between schizophrenia and creativity, and posthumous research of famous intellectuals that have been insinuated to have suffered from the illness. Hollywood played a pivotal role popularizing the myth of the schizophrenic genius with the movie A Beautiful Mind that depicted the life story of Nobel Laureate, John Nash and his struggle with the illness.
Splitting (psychology)
Splits in consciousness ("normal self" vs. "secondary self") was first described by Pierre Janet in "De l'Automatisme Psychologique" (1889). His ideas were extended by Bleuler (who in 1908 coined the word schizofrenia from the Ancient Greek "skhízō" and "phrḗn" ) and Freud to explain the splitting () of consciousness, not (with Janet) as the product of innate weakness, but as the result of inner conflict. With the development of the idea of repression, splitting moved to the background of Freud's thought for some years, being largely reserved for cases of double personality. However, his late work saw a renewed interest in how it was "possible for the ego to avoid a rupture... by effecting a cleavage or division of itself", a theme which was extended in his "Outline of Psycho-Analysis" (1940a [1938]) beyond fetishism to the neurotic in general.
Social construction of schizophrenia
The terms "schizophrenia" and "autism" originated from the works of Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939) as different aspects of the same diagnostic condition. Bleuler was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Prior to Bleuler's interventions schizophrenia was referred to as dementia praecox (early insanity) and perceived as a single disorder. Schizophrenia is sometimes also referred to as hebephrenia, stemming in etymology from the Greek god Hebe who was associated with adolescence and as it was thought the onset of schizophrenia came at adolescence. It is generally acknowledged that schizophrenia can have early onset and late onset.
Paranoid schizophrenia
Since the early 19th century, schizophrenia has been recognized as a psychiatric disorder. It was described in 1883 by Emil Kraepelin as dementia praecox, or the premature deterioration of the brain. It was believed to be untreatable and unstoppable. At that time, very few people were diagnosed with dementia praecox due to the small range of symptoms recognized specifically as signs of this disorder. Years later, Eugen Bleuler coined the term "schizophrenia", which literally means "split mind".
Center for Applied Genomics
Schizophrenia is a complex disorder that affects about a half percent of the world's population. Typically, the first symptoms of schizophrenia typically appear in adolescence. In a genome-wide association study of 1,735 schizophrenic patients and 3,485 healthy adults, the Center identified copy number variations as a potential cause of the disorder. In the schizophrenia group, researchers located CNVs near the CACNA1B and DOC2A genes, both of which facilitate calcium signals that are important to neurotransmission in the brain. They also identified CNVs near the RET and RIT2 genes, which are known to be involved in brain development. Some of the regions associated with schizophrenia have previously been found to associate with autism and ADHD. This provides a strong indication that many psychiatric disorders stem share similar neurodevelopmental features.
Causes of schizophrenia
It has been hypothesized since the 1970s that brain hypoxia (low oxygen levels) before, at or immediately after birth may be a risk factor for the development of schizophrenia.
Sluggish schizophrenia
A majority of experts believe that the concept was developed under instructions from the Soviet secret service KGB and the Communist Party.
Eugen Bleuler
Bleuler introduced the term "schizophrenia" to the world in a lecture in Berlin on 24 April 1908. However, perhaps as early as 1907 he and his colleagues had been using the term in Zurich to replace Emil Kraepelin's term dementia praecox. He revised and expanded his schizophrenia concept in his seminal study of 1911, "Dementia Praecox, oder Gruppe der Schizophrenien" ("Dementia Praecox, or Group of Schizophrenias"), which was translated into English only in 1950 (by Joseph Zinkin).
Robin Murray
Robin Murray trained in medicine at the University of Glasgow. After qualifying, he researched the chronic renal failure induced by the massive abuse of a local headache powder, Askit Powders. Then he started training in psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital in London, and has remained there ever since apart from one year at the National Institute of Mental Health in the USA. He has been Dean of the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, and Professor of Psychiatry there, but now focuses on research into, and care of people with psychotic illness. In 1987 he and Shon Lewis were among the first to suggest that schizophrenia might in part be a neurodevelopmental disorder.
Brodmann area 45
Schizophrenia is a poorly understood disease with complicated symptoms. In an effort to find a cause for this problem, these researchers looked at the brains of schizophrenic patients. It had been shown previously that abnormal gyrification, asymmetry, complexity, and variability occur in patients with schizophrenia. These investigators presented data showing that pt, specifically was highly distorted in schizophrenic patients compared with demographically matched normal subjects. They asserted that Broca's area is an especially plastic region of the brain in that its morphology can change dramatically from childhood to adulthood. This makes sense when considering the special ability of children to easily learn language, but it also means that the involvement of Broca's area is limited with respect to memory and recall; children do not seem to be unable to consciously search their memories. Furthermore, investigators took volumetric measurements of the grey and white matter of the brains of their test subjects and compared those measurements to their normal control subjects. They found that schizophrenic patients had dramatically reduced white matter.
Interpretation of Schizophrenia
A characteristic of "Homo sapiens" is a prolonged childhood with a consequently extended dependency on adults. This, according to Arieti, "is the basis of the psychodynamics of schizophrenia", a claim that also appears in later writers on child abuse such as Alice Miller and Colin Ross. Arieti reviews the paper by Frieda Fromm-Reichmann about the "schizophrenogenic" mother and reaches the tentative conclusion that only 25 percent of the mothers of people with schizophrenia in his clinical experience fit that image. However, he adds that only in a minority of schizophrenia cases "the child is able to retain the good maternal image". Arieti also mentions the work of Theodore Lidz, another trauma model author of schizophrenia. Like Lidz, Arieti emphasizes the weakness of the father of the patient with schizophrenia in the paternal role. In Arieti's own words:
History of psychiatry
In the early 1800s, psychiatry made advances in the diagnosis of mental illness by broadening the category of mental disease to include mood disorders, in addition to disease level delusion or irrationality. The term psychiatry (Greek "ψυχιατρική", "psychiatrikē") which comes from the Greek "ψυχή" ("psychē": "soul or mind") and "ιατρός" ("iatros": "healer") was coined by Johann Christian Reil in 1808. Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, a student of Pinel, defined lypemania as an 'affective monomania' (excessive attention to a single thing). This was an early diagnosis of depression.
Social construction of schizophrenia
"He first advanced the term schizophrenia in 1908 in a paper based on a study of 647 Burghölzli patients. He then expanded on his paper of 1908 in Dementia Praecox oder Gruppe der Schizophrenie…Bleuler is credited with the introduction of two concepts fundamental to the analysis of schizophrenia: autism, denoting the loss of contact with reality, frequently through indulgence in bizarre fantasy; and ambivalence, denoting the coexistence of mutually exclusive contradictions within the psyche."
Causes of schizophrenia
This is known as the pathogenic theory of schizophrenia or germ theory of schizophrenia. It is a pathogenic theory of disease in which it is thought that a proximal cause of certain cases of schizophrenia is the interaction of the developing fetus with pathogens such as viruses, or with antibodies from the mother created in response to these pathogens (in particular, Interleukin 8). Substantial research suggests that exposure to certain illnesses (e.g., influenza) in the mother of the neonate (especially at the end of the second trimester) causes defects in neural development which may emerge as a predisposition to schizophrenia around the time of puberty, as the brain grows and develops.
Apophenia
Apophenia () is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. The term (German: "") was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness". He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations.
History of schizophrenia
The word "schizophrenia" was coined by the Swiss psychiatrist and eugenicist Eugen Bleuler in 1908, and was intended to describe the separation of function between personality, thinking, memory, and perception. He formally introduced the term on 24 April 1908 in a lecture given at a psychiatric conference in Berlin and in a publication that same year. Bleuler later expanded his new disease concept into a monograph in 1911, which was finally translated into English in 1950.
Schizophrenia Research Foundation
Schizophrenia Research Foundation (SCARF), is a non governmental, non profit organisation based in Chennai. Founded in 1984 by a group of philanthropists and mental health professionals led by M. Sarada Menon, a psychiatrist by profession. SCARF has established itself as a center of repute in rehabilitation and research in disorders of the mind. SCARF is one of the very few NGOs in the world to be named as a collaborating centre of the World Health Organization for mental health research and training.
SCARF has been involved in several studies conducted by the World Health Organisation. Some of its collaborating partners in mental health research are World Health Organization, World Psychiatric Association, Johns Hopkins University, King's College London, Oxfam, Indian Council of Medical Research, AIIMS, NIMHANS and TISS. Tamil Nadu MGR Medical University has approved SCARF as a centre for doctoral studies in 'Mental health and Social Sciences'.
Childhood schizophrenia
Before 1980 the literature on "childhood schizophrenia" often described a "heterogeneous mixture" of different disorders, such as autism, symbiotic psychosis or psychotic disorder other than schizophrenia, pervasive developmental disorders and dementia infantilis. At the current time, however, some researchers, regarded autism (autistic disorder) and schizophrenia as two distinct entities.
Trauma model of mental disorders
Some of the psychogenic models proposed by these early researchers, such as the "schizophrenogenic mother", came under sustained criticism, from feminists who saw them as 'mother-blaming' and from a psychiatric profession that increasingly moved towards biological determinism. From the 1960s pharmacological treatments became the increasing focus of psychiatry, and by the 1980s the theory that the family dynamics could be implicated in the aetiology of schizophrenia became viewed as unacceptable by many mental health professionals in America and Europe. Before his death in 2001, at 90, Theodore Lidz, one of the main proponents of the "schizophrenogenic" parents theory, expressed regret that current research in biological psychiatry was "barking up the wrong tree". Like Lidz, Laing maintained until his death that the cause of both schizoid personality disorder and schizophrenia was influenced by family relationships. And more recent research bears this out, e.g. child abuse has been shown to have a causal role in depression, PTSD, eating disorders, substance abuse and dissociative disorders, and research reveals that the more severe the abuse the higher the probability that psychiatric symptoms will develop in adult life.
Childhood schizophrenia
In schizophrenia's section "development and course" in the DSM-5 they wrote:
The diagnosis of schizophrenia was often given to children who by today’s standards would be diagnosed as having of autism or pervasive developmental disorder. This may be because the onset of schizophrenia is gradual, with symptoms relating developmental difficulties or abnormalities appearing before psychotic symptoms.
Andrei Snezhnevsky
At the height of his power, Snezhnevsky dominated the whole of Soviet psychiatry. He forced the psychiatric community in the USSR and in many of its Eastern European satellites to adopt the diagnosis of sluggish schizophrenia as dogma. Starting in the early 1950s, Snezhnevsky opposed the concept of "soft" schizophrenia but later promoted the same idea under a different title: "slow-flowing", or "sluggish." The term "sluggish schizophrenia" was invented by Snezhnevsky and became widespread by the 1960s. The prevalence of Snezhnevsky's theories directly led to a broadening of the boundaries of disease such that even the mildest behavioral change could be interpreted as indication of mental disorder. Despite his power and virtual monopolies on textbooks and conferences, some prominent Soviet doctors were unwilling to accept Snezhnevsky's methods, such as Iosif Polishchuk in Kiev, and Fyodor Detengof in Dushanbe.
Abram Hoffer
Hoffer's claims regarding schizophrenia and his theories of orthomolecular medicine have been criticized. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association reported methodological flaws in Hoffer's work on niacin as a schizophrenia treatment and referred to follow-up studies that did not confirm any benefits of the treatment,
prompting at least two responses.
Multiple additional studies in the United States, Canada, and Australia similarly failed to find benefits of megavitamin therapy to treat schizophrenia. The term "orthomolecular medicine" was labeled a misnomer as early as 1973. Psychiatrist and critic of psychiatry Thomas Szasz, author of "The Myth of Mental Illness" (1961), called Hoffer's ideas about schizophrenia "pure quackery" and his claims "arrogant" for attributing the condition of mental illness to an unsubstantiated nutrient deficiency (a physical illness), as well as their support for Schizophrenics International, a group that attempts to deal with schizophrenia similar to alcoholism in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Ernst Rüdin
Commencing in 1893 Rüdin studied medicine at universities in several countries, graduating in 1898. At the Burghölzli in Zurich, he worked as assistant to Eugen Bleuler who coined the term 'schizophrenia'. He completed his PhD, then a psychiatric residency at a Berlin prison. From 1907 he worked at the University of Munich as assistant to Emil Kraepelin, the highly influential psychiatrist who had developed the diagnostic split between 'dementia praecox' ('early dementia' – reflecting his pessimistic prognosis – renamed schizophrenia) and 'manic-depressive illness' (including unipolar depression), and who is considered by many to be the father of modern psychiatric classification. Rüdin became senior lecturer in 1909 as well as senior physician at the Munich Psychiatric Hospital, succeeding Alois Alzheimer.
Emil Kraepelin
He also reported a pattern to the course and outcome of these conditions. Kraepelin believed that schizophrenia had a deteriorating course in which mental function continuously (although perhaps erratically) declines, while manic-depressive patients experienced a course of illness which was intermittent, where patients were relatively symptom-free during the intervals which separate acute episodes. This led Kraepelin to name what we now know as schizophrenia, dementia praecox (the dementia part signifying the irreversible mental decline). It later became clear that dementia praecox did not necessarily lead to mental decline and was thus renamed schizophrenia by Eugen Bleuler to correct Kraepelin's misnomer.
Leo Kanner
Published in the journal "Nervous Child", "Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact" was one of the most cited papers on autism in the twentieth century. In his landmark paper, Kanner took the term "autism," which Eugen Bleuler previously attributed to the inward, introspective symptoms typical in adult schizophrenia patients, and labeled the eleven children in his study as having "infantile autism." However, rather than relating his observations to the qualities and symptoms seen in schizophrenic adults, Kanner classified his description of "autism" to be independent from the psychotic disorder, explaining how autism was not a precursor to schizophrenia, and that the symptoms of the former appeared evident and present at birth. A significant work, this paper on "Kanner Syndrome" formed the basis for later research conducted by Kanner and others on what later became known as childhood autism.
Schizophrenia
In the early 20th century, the psychiatrist Kurt Schneider listed the forms of psychotic symptoms that he thought distinguished schizophrenia from other psychotic disorders. These are called "first-rank symptoms" or Schneider's first-rank symptoms. They include delusions of being controlled by an external force, the belief that thoughts are being inserted into or withdrawn from one's conscious mind, the belief that one's thoughts are being broadcast to other people, and hearing hallucinatory voices that comment on one's thoughts or actions or that have a conversation with other hallucinated voices. Although they have significantly contributed to the current diagnostic criteria, the specificity of first-rank symptoms has been questioned. A review of the diagnostic studies conducted between 1970 and 2005 found that they allow neither a reconfirmation nor a rejection of Schneider's claims, and suggested that first-rank symptoms should be de-emphasized in future revisions of diagnostic systems. The absence of first-rank symptoms should raise suspicion of a medical disorder.
Controversies about psychiatry
The exclusion of affective components from the criteria for schizophrenia, despite their ubiquity in clinical settings, has also caused contention. This exclusion in the DSM has resulted in a "rather convoluted" separate disorder—schizoaffective disorder. Citing poor interrater reliability, some psychiatrists have totally contested the concept of schizoaffective disorder as a separate entity. The categorical distinction between mood disorders and schizophrenia, known as the Kraepelinian dichotomy, has also been challenged by data from genetic epidemiology.
History of mental disorders
The term "crazy" (from Middle English meaning cracked) and insane (from Latin insanus meaning unhealthy) came to mean mental disorder in this period. The term "lunacy", long used to refer to periodic disturbance or epilepsy, came to be synonymous with insanity. "Madness", long in use in root form since at least the early centuries AD, and originally meaning crippled, hurt or foolish, came to mean loss of reason or self-restraint. "Psychosis", from Greek "principle of life/animation", had varied usage referring to a condition of the mind/soul. "Nervous", from an Indo-European root meaning to wind or twist, meant muscle or vigor, was adopted by physiologists to refer to the body's electrochemical signalling process (thus called the nervous system), and was then used to refer to nervous disorders and neurosis. "Obsession", from a Latin root meaning to sit on or sit against, originally meant to besiege or be possessed by an evil spirit, came to mean a fixed idea that could decompose the mind.
Evolution of schizophrenia
Given the high numbers of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia (nearly 1% of modern-day populations), it is unlikely that the disorder has arisen solely from random mutations. Instead it is believed that, despite its maladaptive nature, schizophrenia has been either selected for throughout the years or exists as a selective by-product.
Chester Brown
Brown first discusses mental illness in his strip "My Mother Was A Schizophrenic". In it, he puts forward the anti-psychiatric idea that what we call "schizophrenia" isn't a real disease at all, but instead a tool our society uses to deal with people who display socially unacceptable beliefs and behaviour. Inspired by the evangelical tracts of Jack T. Chick, Brown left Xeroxes of these strips at bus stops and phone booths around Toronto so its message would reach a wider audience. It first appeared in "Underwater" #4, and is also reprinted in the collection "The Little Man".
Catastrophic schizophrenia
In psychiatry, catastrophic schizophrenia or schizocaria is an obsolete term for a rare and acute form of schizophrenia leading directly to a severe and unremitting chronic psychosis (the long term occurrence of psychosis) and deterioration of the personality. Catastrophic schizophrenia was thought to be the most severe subtype of schizophrenia, as it had "an acute onset and rapid decline into a chronic state without remission". Catastrophic schizophrenia was also referred to as schizocaria, which was defined by Gerhard Mauz as a psychosis that caused the absolute destruction of the core of one's being.
The term "catastrophic schizophrenia" has fallen out of use due to a number of reasons, including advances in psychiatric treatment, which led to a significant decline in patients that fit the diagnosis as their symptoms did not reach the severity of catastrophic schizophrenia, along with modern refinement of the definition and subtypes of schizophrenia. This term has not been included in any version of the DSM. In modern terms, catastrophic schizophrenia would likely be defined as 'acute-onset chronic schizophrenia with poor prognosis'.
History of schizophrenia
In the early 1970s, the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia was the subject of a number of controversies which eventually led to the operational criteria used today. It became clear after the 1971 US-UK Diagnostic Study that schizophrenia was diagnosed to a far greater extent in America than in Europe. This was partly due to looser diagnostic criteria in the US, which used the DSM-II manual, contrasting with Europe and its ICD-9. David Rosenhan's 1972 study, published in the journal "Science" under the title "On being sane in insane places", concluded that the diagnosis of schizophrenia in the US was often subjective and unreliable.
Causes of schizophrenia
The largest most comprehensive genetic study of its kind, involving tests of several hundred single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in nearly 1,900 individuals with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 2,000 comparison subjects, reported in 2008 that there was no evidence of any significant association between the disorders and any of 14 previously identified candidate genes ("RGS4", "DISC1", "DTNBP1", "STX7", "TAAR6", "PPP3CC", "NRG1", "DRD2", "HTR2A", "DAOA", "AKT1", 
"CHRNA7", "COMT", and "ARVCF"). The statistical distributions suggested nothing more than chance variation. The authors concluded that the findings make it unlikely that common SNPs in these genes account for a substantial proportion of the genetic risk for schizophrenia, although small effects could not be ruled out.
Bipolar disorder
Variations in moods and energy levels have been observed as part of the human experience throughout history. The words "melancholia", an old word for depression, and "mania" originated in Ancient Greece. The word melancholia is derived from "melas" (), meaning "black", and "chole" (), meaning "bile" or "gall", indicative of the term's origins in pre-Hippocratic humoral theory. Within the humoral theories, mania was viewed as arising from an excess of yellow bile, or a mixture of black and yellow bile. The linguistic origins of mania, however, are not so clear-cut. Several etymologies were proposed by the Ancient Roman physician Caelius Aurelianus, including the Greek word "ania", meaning "to produce great mental anguish", and "manos", meaning "relaxed" or "loose", which would contextually approximate to an excessive relaxing of the mind or soul. There are at least five other candidates, and part of the confusion surrounding the exact etymology of the word mania is its varied usage in the pre-Hippocratic poetry and mythology.
Anhedonia
L.J. and J.P. Chapman were the first to discuss the possibility that social anhedonia may stem from a genetic vulnerability. The Disrupted in Schizophrenia 1 (DISC1) gene has been consistently associated with risk for, and cause of, schizophrenia-spectrum disorders and other mental illnesses. More recently, DISC1 has been associated with social anhedonia within the general population. Tomppo (2009) identified a specific DISC1 allele that is associated with an increase in characteristics of social anhedonia. They also identified a DISC1 allele associated with decreased characteristics of social anhedonia, that was found to be preferentially expressed in women. More research needs to be conducted, but social anhedonia may be an important intermediate phenotype (endophenotype) between genes associated with risk for schizophrenia and phenotype of the disorder. Continued study of social anhedonia and its genetic components will help researchers and clinicians learn more about the cause of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders.
Psychosis
The division of the major psychoses into manic depressive illness (now called bipolar disorder) and dementia praecox (now called schizophrenia) was made by Emil Kraepelin, who attempted to create a synthesis of the various mental disorders identified by 19th century psychiatrists, by grouping diseases together based on classification of common symptoms. Kraepelin used the term 'manic depressive insanity' to describe the whole spectrum of mood disorders, in a far wider sense than it is usually used today.
Thomas Szasz
In Szasz's view, people who are said by themselves or others to have a mental illness can only have, at best, "problems in living". Diagnoses of "mental illness" or "mental disorder" (the latter expression called by Szasz a "weasel term" for mental illness) are passed off as "scientific categories" but they remain merely judgments (judgments of disdain) to support certain uses of power by psychiatric authorities. In that line of thinking, schizophrenia becomes not the name of a disease entity but a judgment of extreme psychiatric and social disapprobation. Szasz called schizophrenia "the sacred symbol of psychiatry" because those so labeled have long provided and continue to provide justification for psychiatric theories, treatments, abuses, and reforms.
Social construction of schizophrenia
"From the perspective of linguistics we see that the reified categories (e.g. mental illness, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder) are abstractions defined by clusters of what we call “symptoms.” Schizophrenia is defined as the presence of audio hallucinations (or other “thought disorders”) in the absence of a “mood disorder.” You can even throw in other correlates like “negative symptoms”, PET scans, response to medications, etc. The issue of the DSM's poor reliability and validity aside (Caplan, 1995; Sparks, Duncan, & Miller, 2005), the term “schizophrenia” is a word used to communicate the presence of these “symptoms.” The various human manifestations of thought, feeling, and behavior (aka “symptoms”) exist like the chair you are sitting on as you read this exists. But the next level of abstraction, the word “schizophrenia”, and the next, “mental illness”, only exist through consensus and only persist by convention. Even if the correlations of defining symptoms was perfect (which it is far from), in light of the linguistic paradigm we have to ask ourselves whether using a pathologizing, deficit-based vocabulary is useful in helping people improve the quality of their lives."
Irving Gottesman
"Schizophrenia Genesis" starts with the history of schizophrenia. Gottesman takes the view that schizophrenia is a disease of the industrial world. because it is not mentioned in the Bible, by the ancient Greeks, the ancient physicians, or authors including Shakespeare. He saw it first mentioned by physicians in 1809 and by Balzac in a short story in 1832, showing minimally the disorder had by then been recognized as such. In 1896, Kraepelin defined its symptoms, and his student Ernst Rüdin began a genetic study of its transmission in 1916.} The book noted that schizophrenia existed across cultures and its rates had stayed steady for fifty years.
Childhood schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that is expressed in abnormal mental functions and disturbed behavior.
Dissociative identity disorder
In 1908, Eugen Bleuler introduced the term ""schizophrenia"" to represent a revised disease concept for Emil Kraepelin's "dementia praecox." Whereas Kraepelin's natural disease entity was anchored in the metaphor of progressive deterioration and mental weakness and defect, Bleuler offered a reinterpretation based on dissociation or "splitting' ("Spaltung") and widely broadened the inclusion criteria for the diagnosis. A review of the "Index medicus" from 1903 through 1978 showed a dramatic decline in the number of reports of multiple personality after the diagnosis of schizophrenia became popular, especially in the United States. The rise of the broad diagnostic category of dementia praecox has also been posited in the disappearance of "hysteria" (the usual diagnostic designation for cases of multiple personalities) by 1910. A number of factors helped create a large climate of skepticism and disbelief; paralleling the increased suspicion of DID was the decline of interest in dissociation as a laboratory and clinical phenomenon.
Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine
In 1967, Hoffer found it increasingly difficult to publish reports on his studies of megavitamin therapies and claimed that his studies were rejected in a conspiracy of mainstream medicine, prompted by what he alleged to be extended conflicts of interest on the part of the American Psychiatric Association. The "Journal of Schizophrenia" followed the formation of the Canadian Schizophrenia Foundation and the American Schizophrenia Association. Hoffer and Humphry Osmond, who developed the hypothesis that schizophrenia is caused by the endogenous production of an epinephrine (adrenaline) based hallucinogen, were called before the Committee of Ethics of the American Psychiatric Association to explain why they were publicizing a treatment, called xenobiotic psychiatry by Bernard Rimland, which was considered outside of standard psychiatric practice. Hoffer claims that one of the assistant editors of the "American Journal of Psychiatry" announced that he would never allow any article from Hoffer's group to appear in his journal.
History of schizophrenia
The 1970s controversies lead to the revision not only of the diagnosis of schizophrenia, but the revision of the whole DSM manual, resulting in the publication of the DSM-III in 1980. The revision was based on Feighner Criteria and Research Diagnostic Criteria that had in turn developed from Robins' and Guze's criteria, and which were intended to make diagnosis more reliable (consistent). Since the 1970s more than 40 diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia have been proposed and evaluated.
Histrionic personality disorder
Although it is said that the history of histrionic personality disorder stems from the word hysteria, actually it comes from Estruscan histrio which means an actor. Hysteria can be described as an exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion that people, especially in groups, experience. Beliefs about hysteria have varied throughout time. It wasn’t until Sigmund Freud who studied histrionic personality disorder in a psychological manner. “The roots of histrionic personality can be traced to cases of hysterical neurosis described by Freud.” He developed the psychoanalytic theory in the late 19th century and the results from his development led to split concepts of hysteria. One concept labeled as hysterical neurosis (also known as conversion disorder) and the other concept labeled as hysterical character (currently known as histrionic personality disorder). These two concepts must not be confused with each other, as they are two separate and different ideas.
Amafufunyana
The direct translation of the term "amafufunyana" is nerves and is a part of a much more complex cultural ideology connecting varying types of psychosis with religious, social, and recently psychiatric beliefs and activities. In a 1998 interview with Xhosa people suffering from schizophrenia by Lund et al., it was determined that through interaction with scientists and psychological services, the preferred treatment for the cultural condition had shifted from relation to traditional healers to active psychiatric assessment.
Theodore Lidz
Lidz did not consider schizophrenia to be a disease or an illness. He considered it to be a personality disorder which was a reaction to a sick organization. As psychiatric research on the causes of schizophrenia turned to patterns of genetic inheritance and functions of neurotransmitters, Lidz argued that family approaches remained more helpful to treatment and fought the classification of schizophrenia as an incurable, lifelong condition. He studied the creativity of many artists, religious leaders and even scientists who had schizophrenia for periods in their lives. While acknowledging that contemporary medications often alleviate some symptoms of schizophrenia, he emphasized the successes that he and others had achieved with psychotherapy. He viewed the common failure to offer long-term psychotherapy as a betrayal of patients with schizophrenia.
Eugen Bleuler
Paul Eugen Bleuler (; ; 30 April 1857 – 15 July 1939) was a Swiss psychiatrist and eugenicist most notable for his contributions to the understanding of mental illness. He coined many psychiatric terms, such as "schizophrenia", "schizoid", "autism", depth psychology and what Sigmund Freud called "Bleuler's happily chosen term ambivalence".
Schizoid personality disorder
The term "schizoid" was coined in 1908 by Eugen Bleuler to designate a human tendency to direct attention toward one's inner life and away from the external world, a concept akin to introversion in that it was not viewed in terms of psychopathology. Bleuler labeled the exaggeration of this tendency the “schizoid personality.” He described these personalities as "comfortably dull and at the same time sensitive, people who in a narrow manner pursue vague purposes".
Interpretation of Schizophrenia
Interpretation of Schizophrenia (first edition, 1955) is a book by Italy-born American psychiatrist Silvano Arieti in which the author sets forth demonstrative evidence of a psychological etiology for schizophrenia.
Interpretation of Schizophrenia
Since the 1980s, and into the beginnings of 21st century, biological psychiatric models of schizophrenia almost completely took over the psychiatric profession. Current research into the disorder focuses on neurobiology. Psychological approaches to schizophrenia like Arieti's are a rarity in the profession, although this structurally created circumstance neglects the obvious connection between psychological phenomena and neurotransmitter levels, which can be changed through certain practices, like Yoga, meditation, hyperventilation, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, among others.
Pamela Sklar
Sklar’s research and clinical work focused on characterizing the biology underlying mental illnesses, in particular schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Her studies of DNA variation have identified both common and rare genetic changes associated with these disorders. While working at the Broad Institute, Sklar co-founded the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research and served as its genetics director. By studying thousands of affected individuals and comparing them with thousands of healthy people, she was the first to associate recurrent large deletions of DNA with the onset of schizophrenia and also found the first broadly reproducible genetic variants in schizophrenia as well as bipolar disorder using genome-wide association studies. Sklar and her colleagues discovered a molecular basis for polygenicity in schizophrenia among both rare and common DNA alterations and that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are genetically linked through DNA variants that contribute to both illnesses. In 2011, Sklar joined the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and became founding chief of the Division of Psychiatric Genomics there. The division’s scope includes stem cell biology, neurocognition, statistical genetics, and imaging approaches to elucidate the biological variation causing mental illness. While at Mount Sinai, Sklar published papers demonstrating that schizophrenia is linked to many ultra-rare genetic variants. Sklar served as a principal investigator for the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, the largest international collaboration in the psychiatric community. She helped lead the consortium’s working group on bipolar disorder. She also co-founded the International Schizophrenia Consortium. After she died, Icahn School of Medicine renamed their Division of Psychiatric Genomics in her honor.
Schizophonia
Schizophonia is a term coined by R. Murray Schafer to describe the splitting of an original sound and its electroacoustic reproduction. This concept comes from the invention of electroacoustic equipment for the transmission of sound, which meant that any sound could be recorded and sent anywhere around the world. Originally, that was not possible, as every sound was an original and could only be heard once. Schizophonia is the separation of this native sound and the recording of it.
Interpretation of Schizophrenia
Arieti then describes the psychogenic factors that lead to the disorder. The family environment and psychodynamics in the etiology of psychosis comes under scrutiny. Arieti describes the building of neurotic and psychotic defense mechanisms; the emerging schizoid personality, and fully developed schizophrenia understood as an injury to the inner self. Arieti believes that a state of extreme anxiety originating in early childhood produces vulnerability for the whole life of the individual.
Paraphrenia
The term "paraphrenia" was originally popularized by Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum in 1863 to describe the tendency of certain psychiatric disorders to occur during certain transitional periods in life (describing paraphrenia hebetica as the insanity of the adolescence and paraphrenia senilis as the insanity of the elders.
Logotherapy
Though logotherapy wasn’t intended to deal with severe disorders, Frankl believed that logotherapy could benefit even those suffering from schizophrenia. He recognized the roots of schizophrenia in physiological dysfunction. In this dysfunction, the person with schizophrenia “experiences himself as an object” rather than as a subject. Frankl suggested that a person with schizophrenia could be helped by logotherapy by first being taught to ignore voices and to end persistent self-observation. Then, during this same period, the person with schizophrenia must be led toward meaningful activity, as “even for the schizophrenic there remains that residue of freedom toward fate and toward the disease which man always possesses, no matter how ill he may be, in all situations and at every moment of life, to the very last”.
Evolution of schizophrenia
This hypothesis refers to the worship of psychics and seers in the times of early civilization; the hallucinatory behavior and delusions brought by schizophrenia may have been highly regaled and allowed the individual to be conferred the title of saint or prophet, raising him on the social spectrum and allowing for social selection to act on the behalf of the disorder. This hypothesis lacks evidence and has not aided in explaining the continued persistence of schizophrenia in modern-day society where people showing symptoms of schizophrenia are typically not identified as saints or prophets.
Schizophrenia
In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association released the fifth edition of the DSM (DSM-5). To be diagnosed with schizophrenia, two diagnostic criteria have to be met over much of the time of a period of at least one month, with a significant impact on social or occupational functioning for at least six months. The person had to be suffering from delusions, hallucinations, or disorganized speech. A second symptom could be negative symptoms, or severely disorganized or catatonic behaviour. The definition of schizophrenia remained essentially the same as that specified by the 2000 version of DSM (DSM-IV-TR), but DSM-5 makes a number of changes.
R. Murray Schafer
In addition to introducing the concept of soundscape, he also coined the term "schizophonia" in 1969, the splitting of a sound from its source or the condition caused by this split: "We have split the sound from the maker of the sound. Sounds have been torn from their natural sockets and given an amplified and independent existence. Vocal sound, for instance, is no longer tied to a hole in the head but is free to issue from anywhere in the landscape." Steven Feld, borrowing a term from Gregory Bateson, calls the recombination and recontextualization of sounds split from their sources "schismogenesis".
Paul E. Meehl
Meehl’s dominant schizogene theory had a substantial influence on subsequent research efforts. His theorizing increased interest in longitudinal study of individuals at risk for psychosis and family members of people with schizophrenia who may be carrying the schizogene. Meehl’s descriptions of schizophrenia as largely a neurological phenomenon and schizotypy as a genetically-based risk factor for schizophrenia have been supported. However, researchers have not uncovered strong evidence for a single schizogene, and instead believe the genetic risk for schizophrenia is better explained by polygenic combinations of common variants and rare genetic mutations.
Paraphrenia
The term was also used by Sigmund Freud for a short time starting in 1911 as an alternative to the terms schizophrenia and dementia praecox, which in his estimation did not correctly identify the underlying condition, and by Emil Kraepelin in 1912/3, who changed its meaning to describe paraphrenia as it is understood today, as a small group of individuals that have many of the symptoms of schizophrenia with a lack of deterioration and thought disorder. Kraepelin's study was discredited by Wilhelm Mayer in 1921 when he conducted a follow-up study using Kraepelin's data. His study suggested that there was little to no discrimination between schizophrenia and paraphrenia; given enough time, patients presenting with paraphrenia will merge into the schizophrenic pool. However, Meyer's data are open to various interpretations. In 1952, Roth and Morrissey conducted a large study in which they surveyed the mental hospital admissions of older patients. They characterized patients as having "paraphrenic delusions which… occurred in each case in the setting of a well-preserved intellect and personality, were often ‘primary’ in character, and were usually associated with the passivity failings or other volitional disturbances and hallucinations in clear consciousness pathognomonic of schizophrenia".
Gottlieb Burckhardt
In 1876 he became a Privatdozent at the University of Bern where he lectured on nervous and mental diseases. This marks a highly productive period in his career as he became a regular contributor to several medical publications including the Swiss periodical "Korrespondenzblatt für Schweizer Ärtze" and produced articles on a variety of psychiatric and neurological topics. In 1877 he published a historical treatment of psychiatric and psychological theories of the functional regions of the brain. In this article he proposed that there were "cortical dispersion centres" which were "rooted in physiology and anatomy in the brain" and that these played a crucial role in the development of mental illness. Burckhardt drew inspiration for his hypothesis from recent advances which had shown the localisation of language faculties in the brain and he believed that mental diseases were also traceable to specific cortical centres. In the application of internal medicine to psychiatry, his research activities extended to an exploration of the relationship between mental illness and bodily temperature, blood pressure and pulse. In 1881 he published on the relationship between cerebral blood flow and oxygen consumption and posited a connection between cerebral oxygen deprivation, pathological brain circulation and mental illness. While at Bern he also successfully submitted articles on the histological preparation of brain cells, sensory aphasia ("word deafness"), the anatomy of the brain and cerebral localisation and forensic psychiatry. From 1881 until his departure from the Waldau Clinic in 1882, Eugen Bleuler, who coined the term schizophrenia in 1908, served as his medical intern.
Schizophrenics Anonymous
SARDAA promotes recovery for persons with schizophrenia and related brain disorders including bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, depression with psychosis, and experience with psychosis. They envision a future in which every person with a schizophrenia-related brain disorder has the opportunity to recover from their disorders. The name Schizophrenics Anonymous was changed to Schizophrenia Alliance in 2015 and added Psychosis Support and Acceptance in 2018. They provide an online directory of SA groups, sponsor five weekly SA conference calls, and one Family and Friends conference call. At their annual conference, the group trains individuals and groups who have started or would like to start an SA group.
History of schizophrenia
In popular culture, the term "schizophrenia" is often thought to mean that affected persons have a "split personality". But for contemporary psychiatry, schizophrenia does not involve a person changing among distinct multiple personalities. The stigmatising confusion arises in part due to Bleuler's own use of the term "schizophrenia", which for many signalled a split mind, and his documenting of a number of cases with split personalities within his classic 1911 description of schizophrenia. The earliest known use of the term to mean "split personality" was by psychologist G. Stanley Hall in 1916, and many early 20th-century psychiatrists and psychologists can also be found using the term in this sense (some reference Jekyll and Hyde) before a later rejection of this usage took place.
Schizophrenia
In 2002, the term for schizophrenia in Japan was changed from to to reduce stigma. The new name was inspired by the biopsychosocial model; it increased the percentage of people who were informed of the diagnosis from 37 to 70% over three years. A similar change was made in South Korea in 2012. A professor of psychiatry, Jim van Os, has proposed changing the English term to "psychosis spectrum syndrome".
Paranoid schizophrenia
Paranoid schizophrenia is the most common type of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is defined as “a chronic mental disorder in which a person loses touch with reality (psychosis)." Schizophrenia is divided into subtypes based on the “predominant symptomatology at the time of evaluation." The clinical picture is dominated by relatively stable and often persecutory delusions that are usually accompanied by hallucinations, particularly of the auditory variety (hearing voices), and perceptual disturbances. These symptoms can have a huge effect on functioning and can negatively affect quality of life. Paranoid schizophrenia is a lifelong disease, but with proper treatment, a person with the illness can attain a higher quality of life.
Dementia praecox
Due to the influence of alienists such as Adolf Meyer, August Hoch, George Kirby, Charles Macphie Campbell, Smith Ely Jelliffe and William Alanson White, psychogenic theories of dementia praecox dominated the American scene by 1911. In 1925 Bleuler's schizophrenia rose in prominence as an alternative to Kraepelin's dementia praecox. When Freudian perspectives became influential in American psychiatry in the 1920s schizophrenia became an attractive alternative concept. Bleuler corresponded with Freud and was connected to Freud's psychoanalytic movement, and the inclusion of Freudian interpretations of the symptoms of schizophrenia in his publications on the subject, as well as those of C.G. Jung, eased the adoption of his broader version of dementia praecox (schizophrenia) in America over Kraepelin's narrower and prognostically more negative one.
Evolutionary approaches to schizophrenia
Fitness-indicator theory, a branch of sexual-selection theory, has been used to explain the evolutionary origins of schizophrenia. This model hypothesizes schizophrenia to be an extreme example of abnormal and undesirable mental and behavioral traits that function as fitness indicators. In this model, the fitness indicator related to schizophrenia is courtship ability, which involves verbal and behavioral aspects. Failure of developing this ability means impaired communication skills, which can be seen in patients with schizophrenia.
Classical compound
Generally, English has acquired its classical compounds in three ways: through French from Latin and Greek, directly from Latin and Greek, and by coinage in English on Greek and Latin patterns. An exception is "schizophrenia", which came into English through German, and is therefore pronounced ‘skitso’, not ‘skyzo’.
Glossary of psychiatry
From "aut" ="self" and -"ism" = "state or orientation". Originally, Eugen Bleuler used this term to describe schizophrenia. In general, it refers to any (pathological) tendency to be self-absorbed to such a degree that the feelings, thoughts and desires of a person are governed by his internal apprehension of the world and not by an external reality shared with others.
Dementia praecox
Adolf Meyer was the first to apply the new diagnostic term in America. He used it at the Worcester Lunatic Hospital in Massachusetts in the fall of 1896. He was also the first to apply Eugen Bleuler's term "schizophrenia" (in the form of "schizophrenic reaction") in 1913 at the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of the Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Cognitive module
Schizophrenia: is a psychotic disorder where cognitive modules are triggered too often, overwhelming the brain with information. The inability to repress overwhelming information is a cause of schizophrenia.
Religion and schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a complex psychotic disorder in which symptoms include emotional blunting, intellectual deterioration, social isolation, disorganized speech and behavior, delusions, and hallucinations. The causes of schizophrenia are unclear, but it seems that genetics play a heavy role, as individuals with a family history are far more likely to suffer from schizophrenia. The disorder can be triggered and exacerbated by social and environmental factors, with episodes becoming more apparent in periods of high stress. Neurologists have found that the schizophrenic brain has larger ventricles (fluid-filled cavities) compared to a well brain. This is hypothesized to be due to loss of nerve cells. Symptoms usually appear around the onset of early adulthood. It is rare for a child to be diagnosed with schizophrenia, in part because of the difficulty in establishing what erroneous thoughts and beliefs can be attributed to childhood development and which thoughts and beliefs can be attributed to schizophrenia. With psychiatric medication (usually antipsychotics) and therapy, individuals with schizophrenia can live successful and productive lives.