The term “schizophrenia” (literally, split mind) was first coined in 1908 by the Swiss racist psychiatrist, Paul Eugen Bleuler. He described what he claimed were the specific symptoms of what in the nineteenth century had been known simply as “madness.”

     He further claimed that a person had “schizophrenic genes.” In other words, schizophrenia was  hereditary. Hence, he advocated the eugenic sterilization of people diagnosed with  schizophrenia so that a race would not deteriorate from those he called “mental and physical cripples.”

     This new diagnostic term of schizophrenia was nothing more than a description of observed symptoms. His claim that it came from a genetic disease was made with no physical or objective proof, but by labeling schizophrenia genetic, it was made a medical disease as well as an incurable one and therefore beyond any mental or physical help.

     Using Bleulal’s gene-based diagnosis of  schizophrenia, the Nazi regime began holding “hereditary health courts” that authorized the  sterilization of more than 400,000 Germans between 1934 and 1939 after they had been labeled “mentally ill.”

     Soon psychiatrists developed the physical brutality of insulin coma therapy, electroconvulsive therapy, and pre-frontal lobotomies to “treat” schizophrenia.  Their justification that schizophrenia is a “potentially incurable physical disease” prompted these therapies that the United Nations has now deemed “torture.”

     By the nineteen-fifties these cruel practices were replaced by antidepressants and psychotropic  medication to “treat” schizophrenia and its three hu ndred or so derivative disorders now described in the Diagnostic and  Statistical Manuals of Mental Disorders.

     The word “diagnostic,” by the way, refers only to “The process of identifying a disease, condition, or injury from its signs and  symptoms.” To identify means simply “to say what something is.” In other words, all these mental disorders, which stem from Bleulel’s original diagnostic term “schizophrenia,” are merely descriptions of what symptoms have been  observed in someone who is “mad.”

     No one has been able to find a genetic or biological cause behind any of them. Another school of mental health practitioners, however, has suggested that the described symptoms of schizophrenia are cultural, not biological, and they have attributed these mental conditions to the inability of some individuals to cope satisfactorily with a stressful world or with a sometimes half-mad culture.

     The therapies these practitioners have evolved are verbal and pragmatic and do not involve shocking, cutting, or anesthetizing the body.

     Author Courtenay Harding’s 2024 book, “Recovery from  Schizophrenia: Evidence, History and Hope” shows the results of one ten year long, innovative Vermont recovery program that fully validates the non-biological premise it used to help cure schizophrenia.

     The schizophrenics in this program had been the worst of the worst. They had been labeled “mentally ill” for, on average, sixteen years, had been considered “disabled” for ten years, were institutionalized, and in many cases were still smearing feces on walls, running around without clothes, and speaking animal-like gibberish.

     With an amazing insight, Dr. George Brooks of the Vermont State Hospital, where these patients had been kept on its back wards, acknowledged to these  patients that he did not know what to do with them and that he needed their help.

     Then he read about an outpatient, therapeutic community program in England which was  “designed for patients who were considered to be both untreatable and  unemployable.” Using the precepts of this treatment program, which  championed education, work, shared decision-making, and  interdependence as a higher priority than independence, Brooks and his aides  worked with these  “hopeless” patients from 1955 to 1965.

     In 1975 Dr. Brooks wrote to each patient he had an address for and he heard back from an astonishing 87% of them. In 1980, 168 of the remaining patients who were willing or able to be in a follow-up study began to be interviewed. Seven years later the  comprehensive results were released.

     Of these once “hopelessly” schizophrenic individuals, 62% were by that time married, widowed or divorced. 76% met with friends every week or two. 47% were still employed (the group’s ages ranged from 59 to 83). 79% of them met their own needs. 72% had only slight or no  mental/emotional  symptoms. 76% were leading moderate to very full lives. Only 25% had stayed on medication. 50% had gone off all medication. 25% had self-medicated at some points, but had stopped.

     All of the most significantly improved people in the Vermont study were off medication  altogether. There was no psychotropic medication of the body for them.

     The psychiatric  community, of course, did not want to hear anything about these results. The lie of “incurable” body-based schizophrenia was too firmly embedded in their minds. Many psychiatrists claimed that these  “schizophrenics” in the Vermont program had not recovered at all. They actually had “affective disorders” instead. Author Courtenay Harding reports that many psychiatrists even yelled at her when she spoke of the study’s results at national and international meetings.

     How could that be?

     Dr. Brooks had started his remarkable program of recovery for these individuals by admitting to them he did not know what was wrong and by asking them for their help. He didn’t stigmatize them further with a label or a diagnosis or a definition just so he could pretend that he understood them. He did not to have to be right.

     Instead he approached them as fellow human beings and asked for their help. That worked.

     Psychiatrists apparently cling to their diagnoses, labels and definitions – and their debilitating body-based medications for them — because those definitions show the “authority” of their knowledge. That way they can be right…even when none of their DSM disorders have  any biological evidence behind them.

     Dr. Brooks admitted he did not know what was behind these patients’ condition. That was the first step in curing them. Asking them for their help was the second.

     Isn’t it time for today’s psychiatrists to follow suit?

     To read this month’s interview with Courtenay Harding by Robert  Whitaker, author of the best selling Mad in America, click here