The social course of schizophrenia: local and societal factors

In this paper, we propose a model of social course of schizophrenia based on cross-cultural research on the influence of family, wider social network, work, political economy, and legal and mental health care institutions on the experience of illness. We posit the way these ordinary arrangements of daily living organize the course of schizophrenia in part through cultural processes that affect the body-self in suffering and in part through social processes that establish an intersubjective matrix for the experience of illness. We believe this model can be generalized to other chronic illness such as depression, diabetes, asthma, osteoarthritis, chronic pain syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, and even heart disease and cancer. We develop the implications of this anthropological approach for research and practice.