Screening and prevention: The most widely used form of preventative health care for schizophrenia takes the form of public … education campaigns that provide information on risk factors, early detection and treatment options.[154]
Popular views and misconceptions
Stigma has been identified as a major obstacle in the recovery of patients with schizophrenia.[155] 12.8% of a large, representative sample of Americans in a 1999 study believed that individuals with schizophrenia were "very likely" to do something violent against others, and 48.1% said that they were "somewhat likely" to. Over 74% said that people with schizophrenia were either "not very able" or "not able at all" to make decisions concerning their treatment, and 70.2% said the same of money management decisions.[156] The perception of individuals with psychosis as violent has more than doubled in prevalence since the 1950s, according to one meta-analysis.[157]
As public understanding of mental illness as a neurobiological disorder is yet developing, patients may be discouraged by friends or family members from taking prescribed medication.[158] Consumers' views on treatment and recovery may differ from those of mental health professionals.[88]
Alternative approaches
An approach broadly known as the anti-psychiatry movement, most active in the 1960s, opposes the orthodox medical view of schizophrenia as an illness.[159] Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz argued that psychiatric patients are not ill, but rather individuals with unconventional thoughts and behavior that make society uncomfortable.[160] He argues that society unjustly seeks to control them by classifying their behavior as an illness and forcibly treating them as a method of social control. According to this view, "schizophrenia" does not actually exist but is merely a form of social construction, created by society's concept of what constitutes normality and abnormality. Szasz has never considered himself to be "anti-psychiatry" in the sense of being against psychiatric treatment, but simply believes that treatment should be conducted between consenting adults, rather than imposed upon anyone against his or her will. Similarly, psychiatrists R. D. Laing, Silvano Arieti, Theodore Lidz and Colin Ross[161] have argued that the symptoms of what is called mental illness are comprehensible reactions to impossible demands that society and particularly family life places on some sensitive individuals. Laing, Arieti, Lidz and Ross were notable in valuing the content of psychotic experience as worthy of interpretation, rather than considering it simply as a secondary but essentially meaningless marker of underlying psychological or neurological distress. Laing described eleven case studies of people diagnosed with schizophrenia and argued that the content of their actions and statements was meaningful and logical in the context of their family and life situations.[162] In 1956, Palo Alto, Gregory Bateson and his colleagues Paul Watzlawick, Donald Jackson, and Jay Haley[163] articulated a theory of schizophrenia, related to Laing's work, as stemming from double bind situations where a person receives different or contradictory messages. Madness was therefore an expression of this distress and should be valued as a cathartic and trans-formative experience. In the books Schizophrenia and the Family and The Origin and Treatment of Schizophrenic Disorders Lidz and his colleagues explain their belief that ..
...To be continued
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