How many people have schizophrenia?
Prevalence of mental disorders
A 2005 review of prior surveys in 46 countries on the prevalence of schizophrenic disorders, including a prior 10-country WHO survey, found an average (median) figure of 0.4% for lifetime prevalence up to the point of assessment and 0.3% in the 12-month period prior to assessment. A related figure not given in other studies (known as lifetime morbid risk), reported to be an accurate statement of how many people would theoretically develop schizophrenia at any point in life regardless of time of assessment, was found to be "about seven to eight individuals per 1,000" (0.7/0.8%). The prevalence of schizophrenia was consistently lower in poorer countries than in richer countries (though not the incidence), but the prevalence did not differ between urban/rural areas or men/women (although incidence did).
Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union
On the covert orders of the KGB, thousands of social and political reformers—Soviet "dissidents"—were incarcerated in mental hospitals after being labelled with diagnoses of "sluggish schizophrenia", a disease fabricated by Snezhnevsky and "Moscow school" of psychiatry. American psychiatrist Alan A. Stone stated that Western criticism of Soviet psychiatry aimed at Snezhnevsky personally, because he was essentially responsible for the Soviet concept of schizophrenia with a "sluggish type" manifestation by "reformerism" including other symptoms. One can readily apply this diagnostic scheme to dissenters. Snezhnevsky was long attacked in the West as an exemplar of psychiatric abuse in the USSR. The leading critics implied that Snezhnevsky had designed the Soviet model of schizophrenia and this diagnosis to make political dissent into a mental disease. He was charged with cynically developing a system of diagnosis which could be bent for political purposes, and he himself diagnosed or was involved in a series of famous dissident cases, and, in dozens of cases, he personally signed a commission decision on legal insanity of mentally healthy dissidents including Vladimir Bukovsky, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Leonid Plyushch, , and Pyotr Grigorenko.