[How to write a useful history of schizophrenia]

Despite the fact that "schizophrenia" remains the flagship of neurobiological research in psychiatry, historians have not given it as much attention as they have to melancholia or paranoia. According to the "continuity hypothesis", schizophrenia has always existed and its current definition (DSM IV) is regarded as the consequence of a linear progress from different definitions (namely Morel, Kraepelin, Bleuler, K. Schneider, DSM IV). However, there is little historical evidence for this linear story. Alternatively, by analyzing in detail the historical "convergence" in which the notion of schizophrenia was constructed, the historian can provide material to answer the question whether schizophrenia's constituting complaints, the ones that cause all the suffering, could be organized and explained in a different way for the good of all sufferers.