TOKYO, Jan 31: Japan’s main psychiatric body has made up its mind to adopt a new Japanese word for “schizophrenia” to reduce the stigma associated with it.

Following a Jan 19 decision by some 100 executives of the Japanese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology, the word for the condition will be changed from “seishin bunretsu byo,” or “split-mind disease,” to “togo shicho sho,” or “integration disorder.”

“The Japanese term... is very humiliating to the patients and family members,” said Dr Yoshiharu Kim, secretary of the committee to change the name, on Thursday.

“In contrast to schizophrenia, which is a Latin word in Western countries, the term ‘seishin bunretsu byo’ is made of ordinary words so that people can easily understand the meaning,” he said. The new term has a “softer sound” in Japanese, Kim said.

Kim added that the conventional “split mind” concept of the illness was misleading as contemporary research also did not support the word-dissociation once believed to be a sympton of it.

For example, it was once thought most sufferers could not associate words like “sun” with their obvious corollaries, like the feeling of heat.—AFP