Customer Reviews

Schizophrenia: Medicine's Mystery - Society's Shame

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Schizophrenia continues to be responsible for a great deal of misery, suffering, crime, destitution and deprivation. Author Marvin Ross has performed a significant service by writing "Schizophrenia - Medicine''s Mystery, Society''s Shame." Ross dedicates his book "To all who struggle daily with the voices and other symptoms of schizophrenia, and to their families who suffer watching their loved ones valiantly struggling to cope." That says it, and Ross lives up to his dedication.

His book keeps everything succinct and blunt. This is an honest appraisal of an ugly subject, one that mainstream society would prefer to keep behind locked, sound-proofed doors.

This hard-edged blueprint takes a logical approach, giving a much-needed critique of historical myth as well as all too recent quasi-scientific blunderings that may have caused decades of delay in the search for rational treatment for this far-from-rational and thoroughly misunderstood disease. Too much received opinion on this subject has been wrong, and Ross correctly dedicates considerable space to expunging error.

Then come the essentials, lucid and well explained. Here is "Schizophrenia Defined," and a section reporting the conclusions of studies into five distinct categories of "Abnormalities." Sections dealing with "Theories of Causation/Treatment" and "Treatment Strategies" must surely be welcome to people who must cope with schizophrenia every day.

If I have a quibble with this book it is that I wanted to rearrange the Table of Contents to place some of the commentary on the lack of progress further down. However, Ross, a medical writer, is making a passionate appeal, and his delay in presenting sections on positive progress is understandable: real progress depends on exposing false doctrines from the past. Anyway, his Table of Contents is precise, so readers can easily find their way around, and his Index surely exceeds the most demanding expectations. One hopes that "Schizophrenia - Medicine''s Mystery, Society''s Shame" will reward readers with practical help, hope and a measure of relief.

Robert Fripp,
Author, "Let There Be Life"
(Sixty essays on our cosmic and organic origins)