[catskul2]

> we shouldn’t forget that schizophrenia is mostly social and psychological in origin

While it's not possible to completely decouple biological and social risk factors, my understanding of schizophrenia is in direct contradiction with your claim that it's primarily social.

As I understand it schizophrenia, the extremely high heritability strongly implicates biological factors. Beyond heritability, many of the other risk factors also implicate a biological basis, from microbe infections, drug use, and pre-natal biological stress (nutrition, maternal health, etc).

None of that contradicts the need to treat people suffering from schizophrenia with empathy, or to improve the social situations they're in, but I think your central claim about "mostly social" is wrong, and undermines the rest of your argument.

[iroh2727]

Agree, but really the question is: why is it going up and why is it going up much faster in certain locations or among certain demographics? Or why are outcomes much better in certain locations/environments/demographics?

For example, it is more prevalent in urban environments, more prevalent among minorities in western countries, etc. it has better outcomes in “developing” countries.

Core human biology likely hasn’t changed much in recent history, so what had changed? Many of these factors that have changed, like drug use, are also very much related to social and economic factors. Of course these are all psychologically related and biologically related. But the point is we need to model the whole system, and focus on what has been changing if we want to get to root causes of change.

[neworbit]

The abstract would seem to suggest methamphetamine is one correlation; you might also reasonably suggest toxoplasmosis and I have heard a naturopath suggest that it can be treated nutritionally(!) I'm certain there's other valid explanations