‘Schizophrenic Person’ or ‘Person with Schizophrenia’?: An Essay on Illness and the Self

Abstract

Most contemporary experts and mental health advocates would reject the term ‘schizophrenic’, whether used as noun or adjective. The terminology they prefer—‘person with schizophrenia’—seems safely to nominalize the ailment and set it apart from the afflicted person, treating the disease entity as a foreign body. The present essay does not advocate rejecting the current terminology. It offers a critical perspective on the contemporary consensus by considering three aspects of schizophrenia that current terminology downplays or denies: (1) how schizophrenia may not merely hijack but actually transform the self; (2) how schizophrenic psychosis may grow out of a particular personality orientation, thus representing the culmination of a personal trajectory or mode of being; (3) how schizophrenic modes of being can sometimes involve, often in paradoxical ways, certain forms of intentionality, self-awareness, commitment or even quasi-volitional choice. Several disadvantages of the ‘person with schizophrenia’ formula are considered: (1) conceptual oversimplification of the psychological realities of schizophrenia; (2) forms of stigmatizing inherent in the biomedical disease model; (3) closing down a potential ‘dialogue with madness’. © 2007, Sage Publications. All rights reserved.