Treatment of Schizophrenia in the 21 Century: Towards a more Personalised Approach

What are the prospects for advances in the treatment of schizophrenia as the 21st Century unfolds? It is clear that many advances have been made in the 100 years since Eugen Bleuler’s important monograph Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, compiled detailed clinical descriptions of his asylum patients (Bleuler 1911; 1950). Bleuler is remembered for introducing the term schizophrenia, in preference to Kraepelin’s dementia praecox, but his monograph is an exemplar of comprehensive psychopathological description, and as the title of the monograph suggests, Bleuler conceived that schizophrenia was a group of conditions, rather a single nosological entity.