Past Issues

“If you talk to God, you are praying; If God
talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead
talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the
dead, you are a schizophrenic”. The above arguments
were written by Szasz in 1973 [1].
The disease of schizophrenia, was fi rst identifi
ed as a discrete mental illness by Emil Kraepelin
in 1887. The illness itself is generally believed to
have accompanied the mankind through the history.
In 1906, Eugen Bleuler who fi rst introduced
the term of schizophrenia, described a splitting
between thought and emotional responses, suggesting
the idea of “split personality.” Recently, a
trend of renaming the term of schizophrenia has
been raised by several researchers and psychiatrists
in Taiwan. A question whether we need to
rename the term of schizophrenia needs to be assessed.
In fact, the underlying issues should be
discussed fi rst, no matter what we choose to rename
or to keep the term of “schizophrenia.”
In the early periods, schizophrenia was
termed “dementia praecox,” which is based on the
biomedical theory. In 1893, Emil Kraepelin introduced
a broad new distinction in classifying mental
disorders between dementia praecox and mood
disorder, which was termed as manic–depression,
to include both unipolar and bipolar depression.
Kraepelin believed that dementia praecox is primarily
a disease of the brain, and particularly a
form of dementia, being distinguishable from other
forms of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease,
which typically occurs later in life. On the other
hand, Sigmund Freud believed that schizophrenia
must belong to the entire mind, not to force a new
model of the mind. The existential master, Karl
Jaspers, identifi ed Freud’s model as “understanding
schizophrenia” and Krapelin’s model as “explaining
schizophrenia” in his 1913 monograph
General Psychopathology [2].