ing carefully structured interviews with first-contact psychotic patients, has showed that people are roughly at risk throughout the world. The same research has found out that this is a disorder affecting mostly young adults and that it is also a disease of the poor, in good measure because those who suffer from it often drift swiftly down on the social scale. At the same time, there does not seem to be a rise in incidence; it 1971, a careful Norwegian record showed an astonishing stability over half a century in first-admission rates. Another discovery of this research seems to be that schizophrenia is a modern ailment, widespread only for the past two centuries. On the other hand, it is impossible, or plainly difficult, to sift the diagnoses of the past in the way WHO can verify the documents of its doctors. After all, mental hospitals with their keen observers are a recent development. The question remains as to whether modern times have produced schizophrenia as a ubiquitous phenomenon, and how (Morrison, 1991, p. 123).
The cause of schizophrenia, like the cause of cancer, has eluded researchers for years, and few people retain much hope that any single etiologic factor can fully explain the disorder. Until now, the most widely discussed notion of a biologic cause of schizophrenia has been the dopamine hypothesis, according to which the disorder might involve excessive levels of activity of
dopamine as a neurotransmitter. This hypothesis has been deduced from the mechanism of action of antipsychotic medications which have been shown to block postsynaptic dopamine receptor sites in the brain.
Yet this hypothesis presents some problems. Evidence of increased dopamine activity in the brains of schizophrenics has not been found. Also, despite the fact that dopamine-blocking effects of these medications seem to coincide with their antipsychotic
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