It was the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Blueler who coined the term, schizophrenia, and his observations of the illness influenced American psychiatric thought and practice for the better part of a century. He also delineated the massively disabling course of the disease and its apparent chronicity in a great majority of cases. Unfortunately he went on to confuse the issue. It might well be speaking about schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia still seems to defy our grasp of it at every turn.
The incoming president of the American psychiatric Association was acknowledging the difficulty and the importance of more precisely defining what has eluded those who would aid the mentally ill throughout the ages. Through trial and error we have fortunately accumulated a few medications that help some of the sufferers in limited ways, but on the whole there has been very little real understanding of the processes by which these medications do their work. Thankfully a combination of research and technological breakthroughs in the late 1980s may have begun changing all that. Nuechterlein Dr. Nuechterlein's review of the influence of genetic factors on the vulnerability to schizophrenia emphasizes that a recent British twin study has shown that schizophrenia as currently defined in American practice is especially subject to genetic influence. For some years Nuechterlein's research with Dr. Robert Asarnow has been documenting the probable early difficulties in attention and information processing which may characterize children and young adults who are likely to later develop schizophrenia.