ABSTRACT
Schizophrenia is the most prevalent, malignant and intractable of mental illnesses; officially designated schizophrenics occupy one quarter of all hospital beds in the United States, approximately 250,000. One must recognize that the mental health establishment, which the National Institute represents, assumes that the expenditure of vast sums of money on so-called research will eventually reveal the "causes of mental illness" — that money in research can reveal the cause and cure of anything. Converting schizophrenia into a research problem, while identifying it with psychopathology in general has the effect of converting all psychopathology into a series of discoverable essences. Primitive cultures realize the major function of culture which is to make men human, and at the same time to keep them sane. Schizophrenia, is no less and no more than the subjective aspect of the socio-economic dynamic of alienation.
