Psychiatrist Asks Field to Drop Schizophrenia Classification

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Dutch psychiatrist and epidemiologist, Jim van Os, has renewed his call to drop schizophrenia as a disease classification. “Several recent papers by different authors have called for modernised psychiatric nomenclature, particularly regarding the term ‘schizophrenia’,” he writes in a review for BMJ. “Japan and South Korea have already abandoned this term.”

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Justin Karter
Justin M. Karter, PhD, leads research news coverage and editorial strategy at Mad in America. He is the Acting Program Director of the PsyD in Clinical Psychology & Psychological Humanities at Boston College and part-time faculty with the Center for Psychological Humanities & Ethics. His scholarship examines historical and cultural formations of mind, subjectivity, and personhood; the roles of activist movements and lived-experience communities, including the consumer/survivor/ex-patient (C/S/X) tradition; and how mental health discourses shape institutions, practices, and identities. He works across mad studies, critical psychology, philosophy of psychology, and rights-based global mental health. Methodologically, he specializes in critical qualitative inquiry and psychotherapy process research grounded in intersubjective and phenomenological approaches. He is the President of APA Division 24 (2025-26) and serves on the Executive Board of Division 32. Previously, he was a Research Officer to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health. He earned his PhD in Counseling Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where his dissertation examined psychosocial disability advocacy in the global mental health movement. He also holds graduate degrees in Journalism and Community Psychology from Point Park University.

7 COMMENTS

  1. Excellent. Schizophrenia can and should be abolished as a diagnostic term. We should follow the Japanese and Korean example. Van Os is an excellent writer and his work needs to become more well known in the US. I often share his views on the lack of validity of schizophrenia when I post on other websites.

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  2. It’s one of the diagnostic wastebaskets found in psychiatry. This sort of thing happens when you deal with syndromes as illnesses in and of themselves and use behavioral descriptions to define them. The only utility this DSM-type stuff has is that it gives one a bunch of numbers for insurance forms,

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  3. Since 2/3’s of all so called “schizophrenics” today are child abuse or ACEs survivors, rather than people who had a brain defect, prior to being put on neuroleptics.

    And the neuroleptics can create the negative symptoms of “schizophrenia” via neuroleptic induced deficit syndrome, and the positive symptoms of “schizophrenia,” via anticholinergic toxidrome.

    And it’s technically illegal for doctors to not report child abuse to the authorities, and instead profiteer off of covering up child abuse, by turning child abuse victims into “schizophrenics” with the neuroleptic drugs. But this does seem to be what’s happening, based upon the medical evidence.

    I’d say it’s time to get rid of the wastebasket “schizophrenia” label, too. And, since none of the DSM disorders is scientifically valid or reliable, I’m quite certain it’s time to stop stigmatizing people with all of them.

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      • I agree, Fiachra. And I think the whole make up “mental illnesses” theology should have died forever, after WWII. But the psychiatrists function as today’s “witch hunters,” profiteering off covering up child abuse for the religious leaders, and other child molesters, and easily recognized medical mistakes for the incompetent doctors.

        And those paternalistic industries apparently are unwilling to give up their “dirty little secret” way of destroying other human beings lives, for unethical reasons, outside of the court system and law. How embarrassing I used to believe doctors, pastors and bishops were respectable people.

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  4. DSM? It’s a CATALOG of BILLING CODES. Nothing more – nothing less.
    So-called “schizophrenia”? It’s no more, and no less, than a present from Santa Claus.
    That’s how “real” it is.
    We’ve ALL been suffering from the Mass Psychogenic Illness of so-called “bio-psychiatry” for decades
    too long….
    Psychiatry = Mass Psychogenic Illness inflicted on the People of Planet Earth, for $$PROFIT$$…
    Any of you quacks wanna debate me, ON CAMERA? Please, BRING IT ON!….
    Do you see, why, for YEARS, I have gone out of my way, to develop personal relationships with
    ALL the local cops?

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