Social Class and Schizophrenia: A Critical Review and a Reformulation

My intent in this essay is to review a rather large and all-too-inexact body of research on the relationship of social class to schizophrenia and to explore its implications for etiology. Instead of reviewing the studies one by one, I shall address general issues and bring in whatever studies are most relevant. It hardly need be stressed that my way of selecting these issues and evaluating the studies represents only one person's view of the field and would not necessarily be agreed to by others. Before I get to the main issues, I should like to make four prefatory comments: (1) When I speak of schizophrenia, I shall generally be using that term in the broad sense in which it is usually employed in the United States, rather than in the more limited sense used in much of Europe. I follow American rather than European usage, not because I think