In recent years there has been an increasing trend amongst psychiatric practitioners to advocate an end to the mind/brain dichotomy and to argue that a more sophisticated approach to schizophrenia is an assumption that the cause has both biological and environmental components. This is sometimes called a biopsychosocial approach and it is often endorsed by psychiatrists who are currently treating schizophrenics with a mixture of drugs and talking therapy. However, it is not a position that appears to be particularly attractive to researchers seeking the cause of schizophrenia because it tends to multiply the already vast field of possibilities.
The sheer number of past and present theories, on both sides of the biology/environment dichotomy, is evidence of deep confusion within the medical model about the cause of schizophrenia. This confusion is reflected in the proliferation of therapies but it does not seem to have had any negative effect on the high confidence levels of individual psychiatrists, even when they are imposing dangerous drug treatments on involuntary patients.
In the early 1990s Theodore Sarbin reviewed his long career in pursuit of definitive evidence that might explain the cause of schizophrenia. He related how, in the early 1970s, he had analysed the various theories that had been postulated up to that time. He said that ‘the rise and fall of theories of schizophrenia led me to conclude that such theories have a half-life of about five years. The conclusion applied to somatic theories and psychological theories alike.’[98] Sarbin went on to cite more recent research that confirmed his own findings but which also found that biological theories have shorter life spans than psychological theories.
Next: 4. Behind the Medical Model: Interest Groups and Human Rights
[98] Theodore R. Sarbin, ‘Towards the Obsolescence of the Schizophrenia Hypothesis’, p. 264.