Psychiatric Diagnosis and the Pathologist's View of Schizophrenia

A popular canard among critics of psychiatry is that psychiatric disorders are never listed in pathology textbooks. This erroneous claim is sometimes used to argue that some diseases such as schizophrenia are not "real" diseases, but merely metaphorical inventions of psychiatrists. In reality, many pathology and pathophysiology texts now recognize schizophrenia as bona fide disease, and physicians should resist attempts to marginalize psychiatry by those who claim otherwise. However, judgments concerning the "reality" of disease ought to be based on our everyday observations of suffering and incapacity, not on pronouncements in textbooks. Disease is properly predicated of persons, not of minds, bodies, tissues, or organs.