ABSTRACT
In 1902, Emil Kraepelin made a famous claim about psychosis: "There is usually some insight into the disease, but while the patients appreciate that they have undergone a change, they attribute it to misfortune and abuse rather than to mental illness". In 2003, psychiatrist Dori Laub and his colleagues identified a group of patients who had been hospitalized for decades in Israeli mental institutions. Each patient had traumatic Holocaust experiences that had not been recognized or seen as connected to the "chronic schizophrenia" with which he or she had been diagnosed years earlier. The researchers saw the video testimonies as "a therapeutic intervention" that might help to "build a narrative for the traumatic experience and give it coherent expression", thus alleviating some of the patients' symptoms. Hospital staff was astonished to learn that people whom they had assumed were suffering from biologically based "mental illnesses" had undergone traumas that had clear links to their current symptoms.
