ABSTRACT
'Schizophrenia' is a problem which has attracted an enormous amount of attention from researchers, clinicians, politicians, and lay people for good reasons: as indicated by various writers in the present volume, the social, economic, and personal costs associated with the diagnosis are almost incalculable. The study of schizophrenia attracts enormous funds and a large volume of publications on the topic continue to appear every year. Most of these publications take the concept of schizophrenia for granted. Sarbin and Mancuso (1980), for example, surveyed the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (later the Journal of Abnormal Psychology) for the years 1959-78 and found that 374 papers totalling 2,472 pages or 15 3 per cent of the journal space used the presence or absence of a diagnosis of schizophrenia as an independent variable. The trend over that period was for the proportion of papers devoted to schizophrenia to increase.
