Salience Syndrome

The Salience Syndrome is a suggested replacement for the term schizophrenia as proposed by the Dutch professor Jim van Os[1][2].

Schizophrenia is an often chronic, severe and disabling brain disorder. People with the disorder may experience hallucinations, such as hearing voices, bizarre or persecutory delusions and disorganized thinking and speech. The last may range from loss of train of thought, to sentences only loosely connected in meaning, to speech that is not understandable known as 'word salad' in severe cases. The causes of schizophrenia are usually a combination of genetic and environmental factors.

To obtain a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a patient must meet some or all of the criteria in the DSM 5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition) or the ICD-10 (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 10th Edition). Recent revisions of DSM and ICD predictably did not change the name of schizophrenia.

It makes no difference whatsoever to a patient if you simply change the name of a disease. It is purely a semantic exercize. Every patient who suffers from any disease is surely more helped by proper treatment, than giving his problem another name.

Why does a professor write a number of articles and books to promote 'his' Salience Syndrome as a replacement for schizophrenia? Maybe it's just a question of vanity.

[1] Van Os: A salience dysregulation syndrome in British Journal of Psychiatry - 2009
[2] Van Os: 'Salience syndrome' replaces 'schizophrenia' in DSM-V and ICD-11: psychiatry's evidence-based entry into the 21st century? in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica - 2009