Schizophrenia — a category error

According to conventional psychiatry, the schizophrenic is a ‘patient’ helplessly in the grip of an ‘illness’ that ‘causes’ him to display abnormal social behaviour, much as a patient with diabetes displays abnormal carbohydrate metabolism. In fact, however, schizophrenic behaviour is conduct, not ‘symptom’. Persons called ‘schizophrenic’ do not lack the capacity to make moral decisions: on the contrary, they exaggerate the moral dimensions of ordinary acts, displaying a caricature of decision-making behaviour. “The last thing that can be said of a lunatic”, writes Gilbert K. Chesterton, “is that his actions are causeless. If any human acts may loosely be called causeless, they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks; slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing his hands.” Chesterton² then delivers this stunning aphorism about madness: “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”I agree. I believe that whatever small truth might lurk in the biological and psychological ‘explanations’ of schizophrenia, such accounts are largely false- for the same reason that the schizophrenic's ‘delusive’ explanations of the world about him are false: both accounts serve to disguise certain unbearably painful truths about human existence. In my opinion⁸, being schizophrenic (in the sense of schizophrenia as mental disease) is a career, just as being a psychiatrist is a career. We are now prevented from seeing this because officially ‘schizophrenia’ is the name of a psychosis and ‘psychiatry’ is the name of a profession. But names are only labels. Conventional psychiatry refuses to scrutinize schizophrenia as a name and insists that because it is the name of a disease, the thing it names is a disease. That reasoning is not worthy of further criticism.Except when used in the highly restricted sense of a name for an as yet undiscovered brain disease, schizophrenia is not a medical but a moral problem. Bleuler's great predecessor, that famous physician of the soul, has warned: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Jesus understood that the man who loses his soul loses everything — except his reason! That is why the poets used to call madmen “lost souls” or the “living dead”. Accordingly, such persons need spiritual regeneration (or generation) — something that theologians no longer respect and therapists refuse to recognize.The void between the spiritual and material realms has plagued mankind for millennia. In the past, men tried to fill that void with theological fables. Today they try to fill it with therapeutic fables. Among these fables, the theories and treatments of schizophrenia are among the most popular.