THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYtive image would be showing evidence of “adaptive salience”; those who
speeded up after an irrelevant image would be showing “aberrant sali-
ence” – that is, seeing meaning where there was none.
Although there was no overall difference in performance between the
patients and the controls, those patients who were still experiencing
delusions showed more evidence of aberrant salience than those who
were in remission. Moreover, among the healthy controls, those who
reported having more schizophrenia-like experiences in their everyday
lives (for example, having unusual thoughts or sensations) tended to
show more aberrant salience in the task than the controls reporting
fewer schizophrenia-like experiences.
In keeping with this latter result, there’s been a growing recognition
in recent years that many people – not just those with a diagnosis of
schizophrenia – hold outlandish beliefs and have unusual experiences,
such as hearing voices. According to statistics, ten percent of us will have
some kind of psychotic experience once or more in our lifetimes, three
percent of us will seek and receive treatment as a result, while just one
percent will end up with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or a related condi-
tion. What seems key to schizophrenia is that the heard voices and beliefs
are distressing. Many self-proclaimed “psychic” mediums are happy to
hear voices that they say are from the dead. Spiritual leaders feel blessed
that they can hear God. The patient with schizophrenia, by contrast, will
describe frightening voices that are mocking and unwanted.
WHAT CAUSES SCHIZOPHRENIA?
Schizophrenia was first documented in the 1890s by the German
psychiatrist Emile Kraeplin, who called it dementia praecox, literally
“precocious madness”, referring to the fact that the illness tends to strike
in adolescence and early adulthood. In 1908 the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen
Bleuler coined the term “schizophrenia”, which literally means fractured
mind – thus fuelling the widespread misuse of schizophrenia to denote
split personality.
The early decades of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of
psychoanalysis, and it was from this school that the first explicit theories
of the causes of schizophrenia emerged. The analyst Frieda Fromm-
Reichmann, for example, blamed mothers of a certain disposition for
inducing schizophrenia in their children, calling them “schizophreno-
genic”. We know today that a history of trauma plays an important role in
schizophrenia, so it’s conceivable in some circumstances that an abusive
mother could be responsible for such a trauma. However, many patients