Malcolm Garland -Rethinking Psychosis in the 21st Century – Brief Reflections From the Front Line
 
THE LETTER 55 & 56 Spring/Summer 2014, pages 75-79.
 
Based on published research, the views of service users, as well as clinical experience, this paper critiques the concept of schizophrenia. It will highlight: the failure of the emergence of a biological explanation for schizophrenia; the ‘myth’ of antipsychotics; the heterogeneity of ‘psychosis’ in the real world; psychosis as just another form of psychological stress. Our summary view is that schizophrenia is too broad a term to be useful and that there are many patients with this diagnosis being treated with a pharmacological approach rather than a psychological one.  We propose an aetiological/narrative based model of psychosis ‘What happened to you?’ replacing a phenomenological one ‘What is wrong with you?’
 
Keywords: limit of medical model in psychosis treatment; anti-psychotics-misnomer?; trauma-related aetiology; service user movement