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Sex and Schizophrenia: Vive la Différence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Shón Lewis
Shón Lewis*
Affiliation:
Academic Department of Psychiatry, Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School, London W6 8RP
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Extract

Epidemiological research in schizophrenia is back in fashion and has taken an iconoclastic turn. Received truths about schizophrenia had a reassuring stability about them, rather like Euclidean geometry. In contrast to, and perhaps in reaction to, the frustrating nebulousness of the disorder itself, its distribution had the attributes of a universal constant: incidence and symptoms unchanging over time and across space–and between the sexes. Dissenting voices were few, but now are growing in number and volume. One sex difference, that of age at onset of schizophrenia, has been accepted since Kraepelin's time, although is still unexplained. But sex differences in incidence, course, and symptoms are now being mooted which hint at sex-dependent differences in aetiology. Much of the re-examination of this issue has sprung from the work of Jill Goldstein and colleagues at Harvard, Robin Murray, David Castle, and colleagues at the Institute of Psychiatry, as well as others, such as Mathias Angermeyer in Mannheim.

Type
Annotation
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 161 , Issue 4 , October 1992 , pp. 445 - 450
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 The Royal College of Psychiatrists 

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