The Heartland: Finding and Losing Schizophrenia
NATHAN FILER
(FABER & Faber, 256 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • Tel 020 7799 4064
The first reference to schizophrenia was made on 24 April 1908. In a lecture in Berlin, the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler coined the phrase for an illness that had previously been described as a “precocious madness” observed in patients.
In time, this mysterious new disorder, with its exotic-sounding name which is derived from the Greek skhizein, to split, and phren, “mind”, would be seen as the very “heartland” of psychiatry: the condition that defines the study of mental disorders itself, according to a 2007 article in the British Journal of Psychiatry.
Thus the book’s title, and why former mental health nurse Nathan Filer chose to concentrate on this particular illness. As he writes: “This heartland is also the bloody battleground upon which the fiercest ideological disputes about madness and its meanings are fought.”