ABSTRACT
FEW ILLNESSES IN today’s world are as baffling as schizophrenia. It is an enigma not only for those whose thoughts, perceptions, emotions and behaviour it so seriously disturbs, at least in its acute phases, but also for the generations of researchers, theoreticians and clinicians who have studied it since it was recognised as a distinct illness a hundred years ago. As one of the most serious
of mental disorders, schizophrenia has been both researched extensively and feared widely. The Latin saying ‘Whom God wishes to destroy He first makes mad’ is not far removed from the suggestion that schizophrenia is ‘a sentence as well as a diagnosis’ (Hall et al. 1985, cited in Torrey 1988, p. 1). The sense of tragedy conveyed in both these sayings is understandable. Schizophrenia is an illness whose cause (or causes) is unknown and for which there is no known prevention. Moreover, even though drug therapies are becoming increasingly successful in the control of symptoms and early intervention is holding promise for good prognosis in the young, there is no cure for schizophrenia. Estimates of recovery rates vary considerably, but it is widely held to be a long-term illness in the majority of cases. It has even been suggested that schizophrenia affects people so cruelly that it ‘leads to a twilight existence, a twentieth-century underground man’ (Torrey 1988, p. xv).
