The concept of 'schizophrenia' could disappear soon

Schizophrenia is one of the most famous syndromes from the field of mental health. Its impressive characteristics and the strangeness of the hallucinations and the behavioral disturbances it produces have made this concept familiar to many people outside of psychiatry and clinical psychology. Of course, among patients and healthcare professionals, schizophrenia is important, not so much because of the above, but because of the serious consequences it has for the health of those who have been diagnosed with she.

However, it is one thing if the symptoms associated with schizophrenia are incredible and very severe, and another is that this clinical entity exists as such, as a well-separated natural phenomenon the rest. In fact, the concept of what we have been calling schizophrenia for years could have its days numbered.

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What if schizophrenia did not exist?

Until a few years ago, Asperger's syndrome was one of the best-known diagnostic labels, due among other things to the characteristics characteristics displayed by some of the patients of this type: intelligent, with difficulties to empathize, and obsessed with areas of knowledge very specific.

However, this name is no longer used today. Since the phenomenon to which he referred Asperger syndrome has become part of a spectrum; specifically, the Autism Spectrum Disorders.

Something very similar could happen soon with the label of schizophrenia, harshly criticized from psychology for decades. Now, doubts about its existence are gaining strength even within psychiatry. The reasons for this are basically two.

• Related article: "The 5 differences between psychosis and schizophrenia"

Several causes for different disorders?

As with virtually all so-called "mental illnesses," there is no specific biological disorder known to cause schizophrenia.

This is somewhat understandable, considering that the nervous system in general and the brain in particular are tremendously complex biological systems, without a clear entry and exit route, and in them millions of microscopic elements participate in real time, from neurons and glial cells even hormones and neurotransmitters.

However, another possible explanation for the failure to isolate a neurological basis for schizophrenia is that it does not exist. That is to say, that there are several and very diverse causes that end up generating different chain reactions but at the end of which a set of symptoms very similar to each other appears: hallucinations, delusions, stupor, etc.

On the other hand, attempts to link schizophrenia to a few altered genes, which would in some way quick and easy to explain a disease pointing out a very specific element as its cause, have been unsuccessful. Only 1% of the cases in which this syndrome appears has been associated with the deletion of a small section of chromosome 22. What happens in the remaining 99% of cases?

Different Treatments for Various Types of Schizophrenia

Another piece of evidence that reinforces the idea that schizophrenia does not exist as an entity homogeneous is that not only are parallel pathways intuited through which the symptoms of this syndrome; there also seem to be parallel pathways in their treatment.

The fact that certain types of treatments seem to work specifically in cases where this syndrome appears to be caused by certain triggers, and not in others, points out that there are different foci of nervous activity linked to schizophrenia, and these do not all manifest at the same time in all patients.

The opposite may also occur, that in certain schizophrenia patients who have significant characteristics in common (which differentiate them from other schizophrenia patients), some drug treatments work especially poorlyor they don't work. For example, children in whom the onset of psychotic symptoms associated with schizophrenia coincide with exposure to traumatic events, antipsychotic drugs they are not very effective.

Conclusion

One of the problems with psychiatry is that it is sometimes inferred that the problems that patients show are in the depths of your nervous system, isolated from the context in which the person has developed and has learned to behave.

Of course, this belief has a reason to exist in certain pathologies in which it has been seen that certain nerve cells are being destroyed, for example.

However, attributing the focus of syndromes such as schizophrenia to something that is "born" spontaneously in the brain of patients can be misleading. That there is a set of symptoms that suggest disruption with reality it does not mean that all these cases have their roots in a specific disease and separated from all the others. Sustaining that idea, to a certain extent, can simply be giving use to a word that has been used for a long time. But it must be borne in mind that in science language adapts to reality, and not the other way around.

For this reason, researchers such as Jim van Os, Professor of Psychiatry at Maaschrist University, have proposed that the term "schizophrenia" be replaced by that of Psychosis Spectrum Disorders, an idea that includes different causes and mechanisms by which this break with the reality. This less essentialist approach of schizophrenia can make us really understand what happens in the lives of patients, beyond trying to fit their behaviors into a single homogenizing category.