Recovery from schizophrenia

Does social class or the state of the economy influence whether people with schizophrenia recover from their illness? Has industrial development affected the number of people with this illness who become severely disabled? Does the level of economic development determine which citizens become insane? These questions are at the heart of Recovery from Schizophrenia. Acclaimed as a major work on its first publication, this fully revised and updated second edition draws on new research and experience to consider whether recent changes in approach to treatment are really an advance. The author argues that we have been too pessimistic about the course of untreated schizophrenia and overconfident about the benefits of modern treatment. Despite the increased use of new antipsychotic drugs and massive annual investment in the treatment of schizophrenia, the outcome from the illness in modern industrial society is no better than in the Third World. Much of what is called community treatment is, in fact, the antithesis of treatment, resulting in people with psychosis living a life in which even basic needs, such as food and shelter, are not met. To explain how society has come to respond in this way to the person with schizophrenia, Richard Warner, a psychiatrist, anthropologist and medical director of a public mental health system, steps outside the usual confines of the mental health field and draws on information from sociology, history and economics as well as medicine to make his case.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Mental Health, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.