ABSTRACT
A student of psychiatric nursing in the 1960s would have had a classroom session on schizophrenia possibly consisting of a description of the symptoms and types of the disease, with mention of the drugs used at the time to treat the condition. Hardly anything would have been said about what was happening in the brain, simply because very little was known then about the biology of the disease. Much progress had been made by the 1960s, of course, to dispel the pre-Victorian notion that this disorder was due to devils in the brain, but the emphasis was placed on the psychology of the condition rather than any physical disorder. Now, however, the evidence is mounting that there is an organic cause to schizophrenia, and much intense research is now being conducted in a major effort to solve this mind-destroying problem.
