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Abandoning the concept of ‘schizophrenia‘: Some implications of validity arguments for psychological research into psychotic phenomena
Author(s) -
Bentall R. P.,
Jackson H. F.,
Pilgrim D.
Publication year - 1988
Publication title -
british journal of clinical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.479
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8260
pISSN - 0144-6657
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8260.1988.tb00795.x
Subject(s) - psychology , schizophrenia (object oriented programming) , etiology , certainty , construct (python library) , object (grammar) , psychosis , construct validity , validity , diagnosis of schizophrenia , psychotherapist , clinical psychology , psychiatry , cognitive psychology , psychometrics , epistemology , philosophy , linguistics , computer science , programming language
After more than 90 years of research in which the presence or absence of a diagnosis of schizophrenia has been used as an independent variable, little of certainty has been found out about the aetiology of the hypothesized schizophrenia disease process. One possible reason for this lack of progress is that schizophrenia is not a valid object of scientific inquiry. Data from published research (mainly carried out by distinguished psychiatrists) are reviewed casting doubt on: (i) the reliability, (ii) the construct validity, (iii) the predictive validity, and (iv) the aetiological specificity of the schizophrenia diagnosis. It is argued that continued research into the aetiology of schizophrenia is likely to prove fruitless and that psychologists should adopt alternative methods of studying psychosis. Two alternative strategies ‐ the development of empirical methods of psychiatric classification and the study of individual symptoms ‐ are discussed. The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious. J. S. Mill (quoted in Gould, 1981)