Social course of schizophrenia

cursory reading of the literature, it is obvious that women's health and social status in Northern India are relatively poor? The authors also fail to consider how recent epidemiological work may change our notions about the WHO DOSMD data. However, Susser et a! (1996) have demonstrated the possibility that acute brief psychoses may constitute a distinct diagnos tic category different from that of schizo phrenia. If that proves to be true, and given that the developing sites had an incidence rate of acute brief psychosis that was tenfold greater than was to be found among the developed sites, it means that the DOSMD investigators, to a large extent, may have been comparing the course and outcome of different conditions, that is schizophrenia for patients in the developed sites and acute brief psychoses for patients in the develop ing sites. Finally, and perhaps most disap pointing, is that a paper that purports to be sensitive to sociocultural issues assumes gender and marital status (see also Jablensky & Cole, 1997) to be variables that have “¿ inherent validity and reliability― even though the discipline of anthropology offers abundant evidence to the contrary. Leaving aside the question of whether the institution of marriage is the same in these locales, let us examine, briefly, a demographic reality. There is, in the Indian sub-continent, and Northern India in particular, a population imbalance. There are significantly more men than women. The same is true in Nigeria, although not to the same extent. Surely, this imbalance implies that the sociocultural worlds in which gender roles are defined and shaped are very much different in Northern India and Nigeria than in locales where there is no significant difference in the population gender ratio.