Life Chances, Life Planning, and Schizophrenia

The first bit of epidemiologic data on schizophrenia was noted by Kraepelin and embodied in his choice of a name for the syndrome: dementia praecox, or adolescent-onset dementia [1]. Yet, after more than a century, we do not have a cogent explanation for this characteristic of the disorder. The second, most consistent, epidemiologic finding with respect to schizophrenia is that it is associated with lower socioeconomic status [2,3]. This finding remains controversial. In this paper we propose a psychological mechanism for these two findings that connects traditional sociological concepts of social structure with recent neuropsychological observations about brain function and schizophrenia.