`Schizophrenic Person' or `Person with Schizophrenia'?

Abstract

Most contemporary experts and mental health advocates would reject the term `schizophrenic', whether used as noun or adjective. The terminology they prefer—`person with schizophrenia'—seems safely to nominalize the ailment and set it apart from the afflicted person, treating the disease entity as a foreign body. The present essay does not advocate rejecting the current terminology. It offers a critical perspective on the contemporary consensus by considering three aspects of schizophrenia that current terminology downplays or denies: (1) how schizophrenia may not merely hijack but actually transform the self; (2) how schizophrenic psychosis may grow out of a particular personality orientation, thus representing the culmination of a personal trajectory or mode of being; (3) how schizophrenic modes of being can sometimes involve, often in paradoxical ways, certain forms of intentionality, self-awareness, commitment or even quasi-volitional choice. Several disadvantages of the `person with schizophrenia' formula are considered: (1) conceptual oversimplification of the psychological realities of schizophrenia; (2) forms of stigmatizing inherent in the biomedical disease model; (3) closing down a potential `dialogue with madness'.