Schizophrenia: A Very Short Introduction [Paperback]

Both authors appear to have strong academic credentials as well as extensive clinical experience with schizophrenia. (Christopher Frith is Professor of Neuropsychology at University College London and author of _The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia_ (1992). Eve C. Johnstone is Professor and Head of the Division of Psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh and author of _Schizophrenia: Concepts and Clinical Management_ (1999).) They look at schizophrenia both as a disease that afflicts individuals and as a public health issue, and cover the symptoms, causes and treatment of the illness.

They discuss how the definition of the disease has evolved over time and continues to evolve as the priorities of the various symptoms change and the disease becomes better understood. They discuss both positive symptoms like delusions, hallucinations and disordered thought and negative symptoms like affective flattening and avolition. They pay special attention to auditory hallucinations ("voices") and delusions of control (imagined external control of body movements) and offer explanations of them based on improper working of feedback loops within the brain. They review different theories of the causes of schizophrenia and seem to give much more credence to physical (neurological) explanations (including heredity and circumstances of gestation and birth) than to psychogenic (purely "mental") ones (dysfunctional parents, double bind, etc.). Similarly they review different approaches to treatment and see much more significant results from antipsychotic drugs than from psychotherapy. In terms of the care of schizophrenia sufferers, they believe that the outcome for schizophrenia is generally poor (meaning that people who develop it generally do not fully recover from it), and I think they believe that suffers are generally better taken care of in institutional than in community settings. They claim that the common notion that schizophrenics have a strong propensity to violence is empirically not true but still recognize that there is a greater than average risk. I assume that their views are, over all, fairly standard, though probably not universal, within the medical and healthcare communities.

I would say that the attitude of the authors towards the disease is not purely academic/clinical/managerial and but includes an element of genuine compassion for the sufferers as well as their families and care givers. I think the main hope that they hold out is that the neurological mechanisms underlying the disease will in time become well understood and that preventive and curative approaches based on those mechanisms will be developed.

The contents of the book are:

1. The experience of schizophrenia
2. The concept of schizophrenia
3. Intellectual functioning of schizophrenia
4. Schizophrenia and drugs
5. Biological factors
6. Environment factors
7. Understanding the symptoms of schizophrenia
8. The importance of Schizophrenia
References
Further reading
Index

References are essentially endnotes. There are no footnotes in the book.