Schizophrenia as a brain disease.

Abstract

At the turn of the century, Kraepelin considered to be a degenerative disease of the brain. Bleuler and Freud, among others, changed this thinking, becoming variously a psychological, a psychiatric, or even a political diagnosis, ie, the slow schizophrenia of the Soviets, giving the government an excuse to lock up dissidents for years in psychiatric institutions. Controversies about no longer are about its organic or psychogenic nature, but about the type of brain disease that it represents. Seeman marshals evidence implicating the dopaminergic system in and demonstrating a left-sided brain predominance of the disorder. Williamson points out that dopamine abnormalities are only part of the story, since large Swedish and California pedigrees failed to show a linkage between the D 2 dopamine receptor gene region and the presence of schizophrenia. He favors a glutamatergic system explanation of buttressed by his own recent observations on first-episode,