Nature of the schizophrenic process; a working hypothesis for therapy.

Abstract

ROUGHLY a quarter of all hospital beds in this country are occupied by patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia; yet comparatively little is understood of the essential nature of what is diagnosed as schizophrenia. Schizophrenia constitutes not only the commonest, but also one of the least understood of hospital conditions. When Kraepelin introduced his concept of dementia precox, he stated the belief that the disorder was a progressive organic disease, after the manner of dementia paralytica. Although Bleuler's concept of schizophrenia was more flexible and made use of dynamic psychiatry in the explanation of the symptomatology, he, too, assumed an organic cause. Yet researches in neuropathology and in general pathology, diligently pursued for well over a half-century, have yielded no agreed-on characteristics beyond a somewhat higher than average frequency of certain types of structural and functional deficiencies among the patients who are called schizophrenic. Schizophrenia is not a disease with