Teaching History of Madness, and contemporary practice in psychiatry, never ceases to amaze me about medical and public ignorance. Such unwillingness to go beneath the labels and try to understand what is really going on. Everyone ought to read Thomas Szasz 'The Myth of Mental Illness', and re-think their own bias and prejudice.
But we live in a blame culture so it has to be someone's fault: almost always mothers are accused of causing autism or schizophrenia... Does any century go by without women being vilified for some major demeanor - Eve seems to have a long, long birthright!
However schizophrenia is blame free: it still is not clear if it is a single 'disorder' or a cluster of different ones. Yet we still lock up people with the label, deprive them of their rights, deny them their freedom, enforce medication, and to all intents and purposes treat them like criminals. The very, very few who are potentially violent are seized upon by the media, and authorities are exhorted to lock them all up and throw away the key!
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