Trauma Model of Mental Disorders - History

History

In the 1940s, '50s, '60s and '70s some mental health professionals proposed trauma models to understand schizophrenia: Harry Stack Sullivan, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Theodore Lidz, Gregory Bateson, Silvano Arieti, R.D. Laing and others. They held that schizophrenia is induced by experiences in profoundly disturbed families, or by attempts to cope with a damaging society. In the 1950s Sullivan's theory that schizophrenia is related to interpersonal relationships was widely accepted in the United States.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, does not claim that the specific etiology of schizophrenia and other serious psychoses has been established. However, the psychogenic models proposed by these early researchers such as the "schizophrenogenic mother" are no longer accepted in the psychiatric profession. Since the 1960s pharmacological treatments became the increasing focus of psychiatry, and by the 1980s the theory that the family dynamics could be implicated in schizophrenia became unacceptable in Germany.

Before his death in 2001, aged ninety, Lidz, one of the main proponents of the "schizophrenogenic" parents theory, expressed regret that current research in biological psychiatry is "barking up the wrong tree". Like Lidz, Laing maintained until his death that the cause of both schizoid personalities and schizophrenia was influenced by family relationships.

In 1975 Silvano Arieti won the American National Book Award in the field of science for his book, Interpretation of Schizophrenia, which advances a psychological model for understanding all the regressive types of the disorder. According to more recent research, child abuse at home plays a causal role in depression, PTSD, eating disorders, substance abuse and dissociative disorders.

The more severe the abuse the more probability symptoms will develop in adult life. In the psychiatric field it is hypothesized that child abuse is less related to the most serious psychoses, such as schizophrenia. However, some mental health professionals maintain that the relationship is stronger in psychoses than neuroses.