British mental health experts say the term schizophrenia should abandoned as it has little scientific validity, and is imprecise and stigmatizing.
Professor Marius Romme, a visiting professor of social psychiatry at the University of Central England in Birmingham, says it is a harmful concept and many of the symptoms such as delusions, hearing voices and hallucinations are often reactions to traumatic and troubling events in life and not the result of the illness.
Other experts agree and say the concept of schizophrenia is a scientifically meaningless one which groups together a whole range of different problems under one label, under the assumption that people with all of these different problems have the same brain disease.
Schizophrenia affects about 1 percent of people in the United States and Britain and current treatments such as atypical antipsychotic drugs aim to eliminate the symptoms.
But the drugs commonly cause side effects such as weight gain, an increased risk of diabetes and sexual dysfunction.
A new initiative, the Campaign for the Abolition of the Schizophrenia Label (CASL), was recently launched, and says there is no agreement on the cause of the illness or its treatment and that the term schizophrenia is extremely damaging to those to whom it is applied.
Schizophrenia implies unpredictability, being dangerous, unable to cope and someone in need of life-long treatment, says Paul Hammersley, from the University of Manchester, who is involved with the Campaign, and he says it is like cancelling someone's life and the word must go.