There is a good reason for our response, we are understandably confused and scared If you have been diagnosed as having schizophrenia or have a relative or friend who has, the fact that these strange, inexplicable experiences have been given a label is reassuring. Perhaps that is as good a reason as any to take a very careful look at what the scientific claims for schizophrenia really amount to and to understand the difficulty psychiatry has in even admitting that there are doubts about the existence of schizophrenia. This is a very important starting point, because it is up to the scientific community to prove that schizophrenia exists and to do so within the exacting terms demanded by science itself. However, we need to be careful about what we expect science to be able to deliver. Science cannot say that this is a fact or that this is true, rather it can only say that there is something happening that appears to have meaning and to seek to understand more about what that meaning could be.
Science is a voyage rather than a destination, an intriguing possibility rather than a certainty.
The unreal expectations we have of science are not the fault of scientists, rather the fault, if it can be described as such of a human desire for certainties in an uncertain world. Schizophrenia then, has to meet some basic scientific standards. If it exists, it should firstly be a description of something tangible, something that stands up to the tests required by medicine, of showing physical cause and of coming to an understanding of what this physical cause might be. By this bench mark, schizophrenia fails the test, so far all we have is a set of assumptions that have yet to be substantiated, in spite of over a hundred years of research.