Both within clinical and wider societal discourses, the term ‘schizophrenia’ has achieved considerable potency as a signifier, privileging particular conceptual frames for understanding and responding to mental distress. However, its status has been subject to instability, as it has lacked indisputable biological correlates that would anchor its place within the canon of medical diagnosis. Informed by a semiotic perspective, this paper focuses on its recent history: how ‘schizophrenia’ has been claimed, appropriated and contested—and how this connects with its earlier history of signification.
I don’t view schizophrenia as a single disease entity such as diabetes or lung cancer; I view schizophrenia as a syndrome, a collection of symptoms and signs that go together and continue over time.
“The most obvious beneficiaries of this biological construction of ‘schizophrenia’ were the pharmaceutical companies who had been unscrupulous in rebranding the generic major tranquillisers of the 1960s as if they were ‘magic bullets’ which targeted a specific disease process—and then developed a financially more lucrative range of supposedly even more efficacious ‘atypical’ medications. Psychiatry stood to gain in terms of power and prestige (and greater perceived equality of status with other medical specialties)—…”