Since the 1990s, doctors and patients have argued in favor of dropping the stigmatizing S-word, schizophrenia, while introducing alternative terms. ISPS was one of the leaders in this effort. To preserve its familiar acronym, but also as an indication of its change in emphasis, The International Society for the Psychological Treatments of the Schizophrenias and Other Psychoses was renamed in 2012 The International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis. The S, which initially stood for schizophrenia, now came to stand for “social” and the term “treatments” was replaced by “approaches,” thus deemphasizing the medicalization of the condition. While the term “social” has long been associated with another stigmatized word, “socialism,” since 2018 and during the pandemic there have been renewed nationwide efforts in the US to promote mental health as an integral part of a social economic agenda. Economists have labelled suicide and drug overdose as “deaths of despair” and the US Surgeon General now prioritizes mental health in light of social connectivity. This lecture will relate the two stigmatized S-words and advocate for a hopeful psychoanalytic intervention.

Orna Ophir, PhD, is a historian and a licensed psychoanalyst. Her book, Schizophrenia: An Unfinished History (Polity Press, 2022) is currently being translated into Turkish and Spanish. During the 2022-23 academic year she gave a keynote lecture at the Symposium on Psychoanalysis and its Discontents at Princeton University, as well as a talk as part of the Greene Clinic Speakers Series, based on a chapter in her forthcoming book, tentatively titled The Covenant: Psychoanalysis and Social Welfare, on the attempts of the psychoanalyst Caroline Newton to apply psychoanalysis to institutions of welfare. Ophir teaches an interdisciplinary undergraduate seminar on the history of madness at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study and sees patients in her private practice in SoHo.

PRACTITIONERS AND GENERAL PUBLIC: $40  |  STUDENTS: Free