Manufacturing Consensus in North America

Abstract

We have already examined how problematic schizophrenia classification, definition, and so forth could be for individual researchers. Yet schizophrenia, as we also saw, would not collapse under the weight of its conceptual problems or critical attention. Indeed, by the close of the twentieth century, schizophrenia had seemingly become a truly international concept, upheld by a global community of researchers. Facilitating all this, and something not yet explored in our earlier chapters, is that over the course of the century, when it came to conceptualising schizophrenia, the once authoritative status of individual researchers was largely displaced by the pronouncements of powerful institutions. Hence, as the twentieth century progressed, attempts to standardise and collectively validate the concept were often made at a communal level through, for example, the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO).