title: Schizophrenia: it's broken and it can't be fixed. A conceptual analysis at the centenary of Bleuler's Dementia praecox oder Gruppe der Schizophrenien.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  In 1911 Bleuler's Dementia praecox oder Gruppe der Schizophrenien served to launch schizophrenia as a group of nosological entities characterized by a "splitting of the psychic functions." Today, at the centenary of this opus magnum, we find that the term is still in force but not the concept originally envisaged by Bleuler.
  
  
  METHODS
  For the sake of this conceptual analysis a literature search was carried out in PubMed, Embase, and the historical literature.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The current schizophrenia concept, as operationalized in the DSM and other psychiatric classifications, is primarily indebted to Kraepelin and his degenerationist take on psychopathology. That approach is now obsolete, but the product still prevents us from moving beyond the notion of schizophrenia as a single-disease concept with multiple etiologies, multiple clinical expressions, and an unfavorable outcome.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  If we aim to investigate the biological underpinnings of psychotic symptoms, first a deconstruction of the schizophrenia concept will need to take place. In this paper we highlight a method--called functionalization--which allows for such a deconstruction.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Functionalization will probably require a new scientific language, which will be largely discontinuous with our current nosological and diagnostic systems.
authors.affiliation: Parnassia Bavo Group, The Hague, The Netherlands ; Department of Psychiatry, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Jan Dirk
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Blom
authors.forename: Herman M
authors.initials: HM
authors.lastname: van Praag
mesh_terms: D000846:Anniversaries and Special Events; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000145:classification* / Q000266:history; D009626:Terminology as Topic