As the 2009 international conference of ISPS in Copenhagen started to take shape, a discussion among members called for the removal of the term “schizophrenia” from the association’s name, given the stigma it both carried and imposed. Based not least on the failure to validate schizophrenia as a distinct disease entity,1 efforts to abolish its label and nomenclature mushroomed. Suggestions such as “bury the ‘schizophrenia’ construct,” “abandon the concept of schizophrenia,” “abolish schizophrenia,” etc., indicated the direction that the association was about to take.
In anticipation of the upcoming publication of the DSM-5, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the ISPS leadership tried to press a change that would go beyond its own name and might influence the decision makers of the latest installment of what came to be known as psychiatry’s “Bible.” Experts argued that schizophrenia was “an idea whose very essence is equivocal,” a “category without natural boundaries, a barren hypothesis.” They condemned it for being “yesterday’s diagnosis,”2 “a construct with little reliability or predictive validity,” precisely because the symptoms used to diagnose it can be understood as extreme versions of normal human experience.3 Among others, these examples were a source of inspiration for the drive to rename.
It was further suggested that the Japanese term for “integration disorder” that had replaced the word “schizophrenia,” offered one example of a name change that was greatly preferred by both patients and caregivers. Yet others claimed that it was not just the name, but the whole nosological enterprise, the attempt to classify so-called psychiatric diseases, that had to be drastically reformed. To do so, it was argued, it would be helpful to introduce a dimensional approach that would jettison the earlier – metaphysical and modern – model, which was based on the increasingly untenable assumption of discrete categories or disease entities. The dimensional model, it was believed, would be compatible with empirical evidence that psychotic symptoms occur on a continuous spectrum that ranges from normality, on one end, to severe mental illness (SMI), on the other. Some also called for a hybrid system that would combine the advantages of the categorical system that was associated with known treatment outcomes, on the one hand, and the new dimensional approach that was deemed to have greater explanatory power, on the other.4
And then, a further group argued that while the current diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia were admittedly “arbitrary and pseudo-scientific,” Bleuler’s original concept of “schizophrenia” was still quite valuable, as it could offer “a much broader, dynamic, phenomenological-oriented approach to understanding the schizophrenic patient.”5 Even those who remained intent on renaming the diagnosis searched for a term that would do “adequate justice to the alteration in the person’s [i.e., the patient’s] relationship with reality.”6
At the “renaming” conference, the initial idea for my own contributing paper was to present a reasoned challenge to all these various efforts to discard the term schizophrenia. Initially, I thought I might take my lead from the gay rights movement, which by co-opting the originally derogatory term “queer” and transforming it into a positive self-label, had, in fact, succeeded in disarming hordes of homophobes. Others, notably in the fields of feminism, queer theory, and postcolonial theory, spoke of the critical need for “strategic essentialism,” a term coined by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to describe the political tactic, employed by a minority group that shares an identity in the public sphere, to struggle for its equal rights. In other words, even if schizophrenia as an essence was obsolete, using the term as a means to a different end was potentially more useful than putting an end to the very concept, then and there.
However, I was not fully convinced that the comparison with other minorities would hold up when it came to “schizophrenia.” Although “Mad Pride” activists called for reclaiming terms such as “mad” or “psycho,” I never met a suffering patient in real life who proudly adopted the “schizophrenic” label as a badge of honor, much less as a strategic, discursive advantage. Given my reservations, I came up with an alternative proposal, as I had noticed that – together with the call to discard the term schizophrenia – the word “psychoanalysis” had already gone missing from the announced program of the aforementioned congress in Copenhagen. Yet psychoanalysis was the very foundation on which ISPS was established in 1956, when Gaetano Benedetti and Christian Müller cofounded what was then called the International Symposium for the Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia (ISPS), whose first gathering took place at the psychiatric clinic of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Dissatisfied with the reductionist orientation of European psychiatry at the time, they sought the aid of psychoanalysis to find a deeper, more comprehensive approach to the medical theorization, clinical diagnosis, and treatment of the so-called schizophrenias. Even if psychoanalysis was not interested in diagnostic categories, and even though the name “schizophrenia” was a term Sigmund Freud, in particular, neither liked nor approved of, psychoanalysis offered an approach that helped understand the symptoms of schizophrenia as meaningful and, indeed, saw in their further exploration a possible path for insight and growth (as the psychoanalyst Ann-Louise Silver, the founder of the American chapter of the ISPS, asserted in this same context). Just as importantly, the premises and method of psychoanalysis allowed for a radically different way of envisioning the putative difference between the states of mental health, on the one hand, and those of serious mental illness, on the other.
The vote was cast, and the international association changed its name, deciding to remove “schizophrenia” from its very title. It was baptized as the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis, at around the same time as the DSM-5 introduced a “schizophrenia spectrum” that replaced the earlier, more clear-cut, categorical classification of schizophrenia. Simultaneously, the American National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) established the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), which suggested an entirely new framework for the classification of mental illnesses, discarding the old psychopathological terms and searching for clues in genes, molecules, cells, and brain circuitry instead.
Given the personal and professional experiences recounted above, and with an eye on the recent trends in our disciplinary fields and institutions, when I was offered the chance to write a book about the history of schizophrenia, I thought of the many excellent, historical depictions of the “rise and fall” genre in this field. But the title of the book ended up being Schizophrenia: An Unfinished History, since its aim is not just to present a study of the appearance and possible disappearance of the term “schizophrenia,” or of the birth and the possible death of this diagnosis. Rather, its goal is, first and foremost, to inquire into the more perennial ways in which we define and respond to difference, mentally and conceptually, but also practically and institutionally.
Notes
1 1. The term “disease entity” or species morborum refers to a natural kind of disease. Just as there are species of animal or plants, and classes of chemical substance, there are also kinds or classes of disease. In the same way that biology constructs taxonomies or that chemistry arranges the elements in a periodic table,