Schizophrenia’ should be dropped as mental health diagnosis, expert claims

The term ‘schizophrenia’, with its connotation of hopeless chronic brain disease, should be dropped and replaced with something like ‘psychosis spectrum syndrome,’ a professor of psychiatry has claimed. Writing in The BMJ, Professor Jim van Os from Maastricht University Medical Centre said several others have called for updated psychiatric classifications, particularly regarding the term ‘schizophrenia.’ Japan and South Korea have already abandoned this term. The official list of mental disorders that doctors use to diagnose patients is found in ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision) and DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition). But Professor van