Recovery From Schizophrenia: Psychiatry And Political Economy

Chapter IWhat is schizophrenia?Schizophrenia is an illness that is shaped, to a large extent, by political economy.The thrust of the following chapters will be to document this claim. First,though, we must be clear what it means. What is political economy? What isschizophrenia, and how can it be “shaped”?WHAT IS POLITICAL ECONOMY?All social groups survive by exploiting their environment and by limiting theirpopulation size to whatever their technology and the environment can sustain.The !Kung Bushmen subsist in the arid Kalahari Desert by camping in smallbands near the few waterholes that exist and foraging over wide areas for nuts,berries, roots and melons. 1 Industrial societies sustain dense populations throughincreasingly intensive exploitation of land and sea for food, fuel and raw materialsby means of elaborate forms of technology. Whatever the level of complexity of asociety, however, it must possess a social structure that regulates the basicmechanisms of production and reproduction—a structure that governs therelationships among the productive and non-productive members of the society;that controls population size; and that regulates the distribution of labor powerand energy in the society. All these functions may be subsumed under the termeconomy. Where the social structure is primarily seen as influencing domestic rolesand relationships we speak of domestic economy. When we are considering largerpolitical groupings (clans, bands, classes, castes and nations) we refer to politicaleconomy. 2We shall be looking, then, for influences on the occurrence and course ofschizophrenia that lie in differences in the modes of production of varioussocieties—hunting and gathering, subsistence farming and industrial capitalism,for example. What was the impact of the Industrial Revolution upon insanity andthe insane? How is schizophrenia affected by styles of labor use, by Third Worldmigrant labor patterns, by unemployment, by land-tenure arrangements, by thesocial stratification of class and caste, by the fluctuations of the business cycle, bypoverty, by welfare support and by variations in family organization that areconsequences of political-economic forces?