Abstract
Huxley, Mayr, Osmond and Hoffer1 have recently discussed transmission of what they consider the schizophrenic genotype. They have advanced the explanation of a simple, single-locus, Mendelian basis for what they regard as ‘schizophrenia’. Moran2, more recently, has combined such a hypothesis with the observations of socio-economic differences in incidence of schizophrenic diagnosis and concluded a socio-economic class-related genetic polymorphism. None of these authors, however, discussed the inconsistent observations regarding distributions of psychiatric diagnoses by different diagnosticians. The studies of Mehlman3, as well as those of other writers4–8, have supported doubts regarding the objectivity of recent systems of psychiatric classification and their reliability for the construction of simple, general biological concepts. Psychiatric taxonomy is essentially a symptom-oriented classification scheme, which groups patients according to symptoms rather than according to the disorders underlying the symptoms9,10, A simple hypothesis regarding the aetiology of ‘schizophrenia’, which is based on particular groups of diagnostic data, may partially reflect the concepts of the particular diagnosticians. The inconsistencies in diagnostic distributions and the biological irrelevance of the diagnostic systems may indicate that ‘schizophrenia’ represents a heterogeneity of disorder constellations rather than a single, universally- and reliably-diagnosed entity, A simple biological theory designed to explain the aetiology of such a category, or class differences in incidence, may be somewhat premature in this context.
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Moran, P. A. P., Ann. Hum. Genet., 28, 269 (1965).
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KAPLAN, A. Biology and Schizophrenia. Nature 210, 870 (1966). https://doi.org/10.1038/210870a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/210870a0
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