The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Right, yes, I hear that you are asserting this. However, in skimming the literature I'm seeing lots of suggestive findings about genetic and environmental risk factors plus some very partial/local mechanisms, portions of which are being built into assorted models and hypotheses, all of which seem to be discussed with considerably more awareness of limitations than you use. The condition appears incredibly complex with neurodevelopmental, metabolic, immune involvement and I'm not immediately seeing anything that looks like a clear etiology that's supported by solid fieldwide consensus. However, I would certainly be very interested to learn about this if it exists.
Thus, could you help me understand what's going on, by providing the references you were thinking of when you initially said that schizophrenia was "well understood"?
My understanding is that the field believes that the majority of cases stem from a classic "2 hit" model. You have genetic load (with some of these genes being explicitly known) and secondary insult (with some of these insults being explicitly known, such as synthetic marijuana). Some of the details of what translates that into illness are less clear, but we can point to specific brain pathways and impacts on neurotransmitters, and this is extremely clear because of how clearly "traditional" antipsychotics work and how questionable most of the other treatments are (ex: Cobenfy).
Additionally we are talking about concerns about the medical model of mental health, with the implication being that the medical model doesn't have much to add or has some inaccuracy issues, but Schizophrenia is a good example of a disease that we know as much or more about than some "strictly medical" diseases - examples I gave were Parkinson's, Alzheimers, MS, DM1 (and sure in many ways DM2).
The existence of knowledge gaps doesn't mean we know nothing or that the models we do have have no utility, which is often the complaint.
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