Introduction

Schizophrenia is the most devastating of the major psychoses, affecting approximately 1% of the population, irrespective of culture, social status or gender. The concept of schizophrenia developed out of that of dementia praecox, a diagnostic entity first formulated by Emil Kraepelin, the great German psychiatrist and systematizer, a century ago. It was renamed as schizophrenia by Eugen Bleuler, a leading Swiss psychiatrist, who gave more prominence to the symptoms rather than to the age of onset and course. How long schizophrenia will exist as an entity and what will be its future name or names is difficult to predict. Like melancholia, it seems likely that schizophrenia will cease to have significant medical meaning in the future, as the group of disorders it encompasses is sorted into more specific entities. The current diagnostic concept of schizophrenia developed within the past decade by international consensus of experts lacks a solid biological foundation. It still relies heavily on the Kraepelinian differentiation from manic-depressive illness, even though this is likely to be a flawed concept due to the extensive overlap between these conditions.