Schizophrenia Bulletin Advance Access originally published online on January 18, 2008
Schizophrenia Bulletin 2008 34(2):253-255; doi:10.1093/schbul/sbm151
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© 2007 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
What Did the WHO Studies Really Find?
2 School of Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, The University of Western Australia, MRF Building, 50 Murray Street, Perth 6000, Australia
3 14 chemin Colladon, 1209 Geneva, Switzerland
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The article by Cohen et al.1 raises important issues and provides a useful synopsis of published studies on schizophrenia outcomes in 11 low- and middle-income countries. The authors use this material to challenge what they claim to be an "axiom" (ie, a self-evident proposition requiring no proof) of better course and outcome in developing countries which has been "embraced" by international psychiatry. They impute the origin of this belief primarily to World Health Organization (WHO)–led international collaborative research conducted over the past 30 years2–5 and caution that the publication of the final report from the International Study of Schizophrenia (ISoS)6 might even further bolster convictions in the "better prognosis" hypothesis. Based on evidence from research conducted outside the WHO studies, they conduct a reexamination of the axiom.
Having been directly involved with the WHO schizophrenia research program over decades, we wish to point out that
1 To whom correspondence should be addressed; tel: 618-9224-0290; fax: 618-9224-0285; e-mail: assen@cyllene.uwa.edu.au