Abstracts

Schizophrenia is really a syndrome manifested by marked changes in the afflicted individual's functioning, perception, thinking, and behavior. The onset can be sudden or can take many years to reach some critical threshold in which the "illness" becomes so observable forcing some type of action or intervention. It is thought to arise from gene– environmental interactions within the context of a diathesis–stress milieu. An often ignored area of inquiry by biomedical researchers and/or biological psychiatrists involves an exploration of how existential crises relate to symptoms of psychosis and how existential issues arising from the modern treatment of schizophrenia are likely to be involved in causing some (or the majority) of the long-term morbidity associated with the syndrome. I describe some existentially oriented psychological models linking existential crises to symptoms of psychosis and summarize qualitative research demonstrating that the existential needs of many individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia remain disregarded despite aggressive biomedical psychiatric treatment, and, as a result, often lead to existential oppression and ongoing infirmity.