Epidemiologyof Social Risk Factors

sance of interest in the role of the social environment in causing schizophrenia and other psychoses (van Os, 2004). This resurgence is fuelled by both a recognition that biological accounts of aetiology are insufficient (Eisenberg, 2004) and the persistence of findings correlating schizophrenia with socio-environmental risk factors (e.g. Pedersen & Mortensen, 2001). Indeed, the sheer complexity and multiplicity of causal pathways to schizophrenia and other psychoses are becoming ever more apparent, and this creates considerable challenges for researchers. Perhaps the most fundamental and important of these challenges is to develop conceptual models that link the social and the biological in ways that move beyond the vague dictum that schizophrenia is a biopsychosocial illness. In this there has to be a role for the social and human sciences, in which the influences of historical, social and cultural processes on human behaviour and functioning have been studied extensively. Taking as a starting point the repeated finding that rates of schizophrenia are higher in migrant groups, the following discussion attempts to show how anthropological concepts of the self may offer one such framework.