Robert Zipursky, Thomas Reilly and Robin Murray, prominent researchers from Canada and the U.K., reviewing all recent evidence regarding schizophrenia as a progressive brain disease for Schizophrenia Bulletin, find “the idea that schizophrenia is a progressive brain disease is not supported by the weight of longitudinal neuroimaging and cognitive studies, and it is not consistent with what is now known about the clinical course of schizophrenia. It is important for optimum clinical care that the idea that underlying schizophrenia there exists an intrinsically malignant process be reconsidered. It has contributed to an undue pessimism among mental health professionals and their consequent alienation from sufferers and their representatives, who increasingly advocate for the “recovery model.”
Article → Zipursky, R., Reilly, T., Murray, R., The Myth of Schizophrenia as a Progressive Brain Disease. Schizophrenia Bulletin. Online November 20, 2012
PIty that Thomas Szasz died this year. He has always said that schizophrenia wasn’t a brain disease (see his book”Schizophrenia:The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry)
I take it that the authors of this paper are honouring Tom with the title of the their paper.
Report comment