Comments on: Schizophrenia beyond the brain

By: Nic Borden

Nic Borden — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 06:45:31 +0000

Anywhichway. America is quick to reduce to extrapolation. Britian is quick to ignore a somewhat regular person in deep need. ahem.

By: _N_

_N_ — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 03:10:17 +0000

Thanks for the shout-out, CC. I do think I was too hard on TL in my critique (still feel guilty about it), but at the same time continue to feel very ambivalent about the article’s oversimplification of American psychiatry’s trajector(ies) of change, various choices re language and phrasing (admittedly probably made for primarily rhetorical rather than substantive reasons), etc.

There’s certainly something to be said for painting in broad strokes (especially for a non-specialist audience), but it’s not just the devil that’s in the details, it’s also often what’s most important for us (“specialists” and non-specialists) to critically grapple with… The nuances of the various international outcome studies (including W-SOHO) are only one example.

By: Constance Cummings

Constance Cummings — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 21:09:11 +0000

The blog Ruminations on Madness had some interesting posts on Tanya’s work, including this article, and there is some back and forth in the comments with Daniel Lende.

Re the “developing world” & problem of over-generalizations, Nev Jones linked me to regional data from the Worldwide-Schizophrenia Outpatient Health Outcomes or W-SOHO study suggesting a better clinical outcome but a worse functional outcome in regions other than “North Europe” (See, e.g., Haro et al’s “Cross-national clinical and functional remission rates.”) On the other hand, urban birth/upbringing appears to be a significant risk factor “independent of differences in the age, sex and ethnic population structure of different geographical areas, and correlated to a number of socio-environmental factors including ethnic density, social cohesion, social fragmentation, deprivation, and inequality” (Kirkbride et al., 2012).