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The Ins and Outs of ‘Schizophrenia’: Considering Diagnostic Terms as Ordinary Linguistic Expressions

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Abstract

Diagnostic terms in psychiatry like ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘bipolar disorder’ are deeply contested in the professional community, by mental health activists and the public. In this paper, we provide a theoretical framework for considering diagnostic terms as ordinary linguistic expressions and illustrate this approach by a corpus linguistic analysis of ‘schizophrenia.’ Our aim is to show how a focus on language itself can inform current and future debates about psychiatric terminology and provide new insights on relevant processes concerning their actual usage and change over time. We hope that this contributes to enhancing mutual understanding between different discourse spheres and stakeholders.

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Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference ‘Objects of Psychiatry – Between Thing-making, Reification and Personhood’ that took place in Zurich, Switzerland from 8th - 11th June 2016. We would like to thank all participants for their valuable feedback. We would also like to thank our co-researchers Marina Lienhard, Veronika Rall, Angelika Linke, Paul Hoff, Jakob Tanner and Margrit Tröhler on the interdisciplinary project “'Schizophrenia’: Reception, Semantic Shift and Criticism of a Concept in the 20th Century” from which this work emerged, and the FAZIT-foundation for providing access to the archive of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Funding

This work emerged from the interdisciplinary project “‘Schizophrenia’: Reception, Semantic Shift and Criticism of a Concept in the 20th Century” funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (project 143804).

Additionally, Yvonne Ilg received funding from the Forschungskredit of the University of Zurich (grant no. FK-15-067) and Anke Maatz received funding from the University of Zurich’s Medical Faculty through the programme ‘Filling the Gap.’ The FAZIT-foundation covered the costs for access to the archive of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

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  1. Centre for Social Psychiatry, Psychiatric Hospital, University of Zurich, Militärstrasse 8, 8004, Zürich, Switzerland

    Anke Maatz

  2. Department of German Studies, University of Zurich, Schönberggasse 9, Zürich, 8001, Switzerland

    Yvonne Ilg

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  1. Anke Maatz
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Correspondence to Anke Maatz.

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Endnotes

1 The collocation analysis is based on lemmata and on a window of one word to the left of ‘Schizophrenie,’ p < 0,001. Cf. Ilg in prep. for methodical limitations concerning this corpus.

2 The collocation analysis is based on lemmata and on a window of one word to the right of ‘schizophren,’ p < 0,001.

3 Cf. the German translation of DSM-III (American Psychiatric Association 1984) for the respective instruction in German.

4 Another observation illustrating how influential diagnostic manuals are in shaping the use of diagnostic terms is the fact that the the peak in use of ‘schizophrenia’ in the Schizophrenia Bulletin coincides with the publication of DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association 1994).

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Maatz, A., Ilg, Y. The Ins and Outs of ‘Schizophrenia’: Considering Diagnostic Terms as Ordinary Linguistic Expressions. J Med Humanit 42, 387–404 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-019-09587-5

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