The 1990 WHO Report on Schizophrenia and What We Can Learn From It

The present work concludes my studies in Prof. Y. Bilu’s class, ”Cultural Per-spectives in Abnormal Psychology ” (51859), given in the year of 2007 in HUJI. In this work, I have focused on the mental illness of schizophrenia, and one particularly fascinating result which arises from a report by the World Health Organization (WHO, part of the UN) published in 1990. In short, the result is that the prognosis for schizophrenia in developing countries is much brighter than that of the western, developed world, with good chances of recovery in the former group of countries. In reviewing the available literature regarding this finding, I have come across three orthogonal approaches to explain said oddity. One group of researchers does away with the finding all together, questioning its validity, due to lacking methodology [2]. Another rejects the finding on grounds of mal-diagnosis of schizophrenia as an organic disease[1]. The final group of researchers tries to boldly explains this result with a plethora of hypotheses, ranging from societal, anthropological, geographical, nutritional, and infective causes.