Professor David Porteous notes that there is an unnecessary stigma surrounding psychiatric disorders, which impedes our understanding.

The ethical considerations are considerable and I think that it's right and proper that there is a very careful ethical review as to how clinical studies, prospective and retrospective, are conducted. I don't see there being any particular additional ethical constraints researching in the area of schizophrenia over, say, heart disease. But what we do need to do is have a more open policy in discussing these sorts of problems in lay circles, in the media, and in education circles as a whole. We've achieved that for cancer, over the last generation or so, from it being a condition you just did not discuss to one which we now readily discuss because understand it so much better and that's a transformation that I'd like to see hopefully in my lifetime and certainly over the next generation's lifetime in the area of major mental illness.

psychiatric, cognitive, disorders, mental, illness, schizophrenia, education, david, porteous