Orna Ophir

Schizophrenia


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continuing to work at the hospital with patients and their families, I went back to graduate school, this time to study the history of my field. More specifically, my interests focused on the shift I experienced firsthand in our thinking, theorizing, and treatment of patients we mostly diagnosed as “schizophrenics.” I joined the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University, where I wrote my first book about the history of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychosis in postwar United States. I also founded the Israeli chapter of ISPS, whose acronym at that time stood for the International Society for the Psychological Treatments of the Schizophrenias and other Psychoses. The name was a mouthful, but aptly defined the work of mental health professionals who were deeply committed to following the psychoanalytic idea of finding meaning in patients’ symptoms, not least by establishing a working relationship with them. Our local branch organized conferences in collaboration with the Sigmund Freud Center at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, with the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society, and with psychiatric hospitals both in Israel and around the world.

      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

      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.

      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.

      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,