End the clichés. In a column published on Tuesday February 6 worldA group of doctors and patients are calling for the word “schizophrenia” to be dropped, which they believe is “stigmatizing” for patients.
For this collective, schizophrenia today suffers from “stereotypes” and “misconceptions”.
These clichés, according to the collective, associate this mental illness with “split personality” or “duplicity” or even associate it with “criminality” or “extreme dangerousness”.
concretely, according toinsert, “Schizophrenia is a mental illness characterized by a highly variable set of symptoms” ranging from hallucinations to “cognitive difficulties” and “social withdrawal”. About 1% of the world’s population is affected.
But “the term is used today Psychiatry to designate severe and persistent psychological disorders whose causes are still poorly understood”, collective judge.
“Adverse” results
“Society has created a social representation of people suffering from these disorders that is particularly scandalous, far from reality and their experience,” the collective denounces, emphasizing that this interpretation is not without consequences.
“The consequences of negative social representations and the stigma attached to them are well-known and harmful, so much so that the people concerned suffer more from them than from the disorder,” he believes.
As a result, the collective is launching an appeal. “French psychiatry must take responsibility for changing its methods of care and remove schizophrenic disorders from the classification of psychological disorders,” they ask.
A debate that goes on
The word schizophrenia comes from Greek schizo which means division and Fran, which designates the mind. This is not the first time that it has been questioned. In 2002, in Japan, it was abandoned and replaced by the emerging expression “integration disorder”, which is considered more appropriate.
Then, in 2012, the name changed to the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis, formerly known as the International Society for the Psychological Treatment of Schizophrenia and Other Psychoses. Voted by a large majority. The term is also considered stigmatizing and unscientific.
These changes were not trivial. In Japan, after the vocabulary change, the number of patients reporting their diagnosis doubled in just two years, from 36% to 70% between 2022 and 2004.
Original article published on BFMTV.com
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