De-othering “schizophrenia”

Abstract

Do psychiatry and clinical psychology have an “other”? This article critically addresses the clinical-scientific fascination with diagnostic challenges and other psychiatric mysteries, focusing on the example of “schizophrenia,” often seen as the most severe and enigmatic of all mental disorders. Over a century of clinical and scientific discourse on schizophrenia has painted a portrait of something indecipherable at the very foundation of psychiatric inquiry. Despite entrenched beliefs, mounting evidence from both qualitative-phenomenological and quantitative research suggests that the experience of psychosis can be meaningfully understood. Further, there is a wealth of data indicating that persons with lived experience of psychosis can lead self-actualized lives, and new studies have revealed that psychotic experiences are common in non-clinical populations. Yet traditional views of psychosis persist in the face of this mounting evidence. I suggest that the key to de-othering schizophrenia may lie in an emerging body of research on “social defeat,” marginalization, and alienation. More specifically, the experiences and behaviors commonly designated as psychosis arise in social and interpersonal contexts that are distinctly alienating, including the psychiatric encounter. It follows that schizophrenia may not be the elusive empirical object of debates about unintelligibility or “ununderstandability,” but rather a social configuration that is manifest within the deadlock of this debate itself.