Culture and schizophrenia

Abstract

•This editorial is a shortened version of a contribution to a symposium on the biological and behavioural aspects of schizophrenia that was organized by the Interdisciplinary Society of Biological Psychiatry, and held in Amsterdam, 13 September 1974. A full account of the proceedings will be published by De Erven Bohn Publishers, Amsterdam. We are grateful to them and to the editor, Professor Herman M. van Praag, for permission to publish this paper.

Medieval visions and contemporary hallucinations

“…Thus the Minnesota patients report that they see Jesus and various saints; they believe that they themselves are Jesus; they receive commands from angels and devils. We agree with, and our data support, the observation of Jablensky & Sartorius (1975) that retrospective historial studies rarely go back further than the nineteenth century because of the limitations in identifying schizophrenia among the various psychotic states described. This precaution, although valid, should not discourage the extension of cross-cultural studies into historicalperiods, but does call for, as Rosen (1970) has maintained, the same methodological rigour that is expected of contemporary studies.…”

“…Our rationale for suggesting specifically that a comparison of medieval and modern data has relevance is as follows. If the prevalence rate of schizophrenia, taking into account the age distribution of the population and the mortality rates of schizophrenia, has remained stable even at a conservative 0-2-0-5% level (Freedman et al 1975;Jablensky & Sartorius, 1975), this would mean that from 2 to 5 of every one thousand people in the Middle Ages were schizophrenic. If we analyse medieval chronicles and other documents, we should discover how people in the Middle Ages wrote about people, some of whom we have reason to believe may have been schizophrenic and therefore may have had hallucinations.…”

Assessing cognitive representations of mental health problems. I. The illness perception questionnaire for schizophrenia

“…Estimates of the prevalence of schizophrenia range from 0.2% to 2%, are roughly equal for men and woman, and are similar throughout the world (Jablensky & Sartorious, 1975). The costs of schizophrenia to the individual, their families, the health service, and to wider society are high (Knapp, 2000).…”

Interpretations of schizophrenia

“…There have been sporadic, unsuccessful attempts to find case descriptions of schizophrenia in ancient texts or in minor Shakespearean characters} ° But the weight of evidence suggests that, unlike melancholia or epilepsy, both of which have long pedigrees in Western medical thought, case descriptions closely resembling what is now known as schizophrenia are not easily found in clinical documents or medical treatises written prior to the late eighteenth century (Jaspers 1963: 733;Jablensky and Sartorius 1975;Hare 1979Hare & 1983. As novel categories of psychiatric knowledge, they emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries within a psychopathological discourse articulated from the site of a complex institutional space --the lunatic or insane asylum, the mental hospital, the modern psychiatric hospital, academic psychiatry, the university, and the research institute.…”