Richard Noll’s American Madness: The rise and fall of dementia praecox is the history of the old name for schizophrenia, showing the problems with such labels
“WE DON’T see things as they are, we see things as we are.” This simple Talmudic saying summarises the essence of epistemology. Psychiatric disorders provide a striking example: they are not real things in nature, but labels we create to describe troubling aspects of human experience.
Sometimes labels take on a life of their own. People mistakenly think that naming a psychiatric problem shapes it into a simple disease with a reductionist, biological explanation.…
