The 'Totality' of Psychosis: Epidemiology and Developmental Pathobiology

Among numerous impediments to further advancement between the fifth and sixth symposia on Search for the Causes of Schizophrenia, several uncertainties endure: (i) What are the boundaries of psychotic illness? (ii) Where do we position what we currently conceptualise and diagnose as schizophrenia within the much broader reality of psychotic disorder among those with serious mental illness and, indeed, of psychotic phenomena among the general population? (iii) To what extent are those components of psychotic illness that we resolve into separate diagnostic categories actually distinct in any fundamental way in terms of their epidemiological, clinical and pathobiological ‘signature’?