UNMODIFIED ECT: A NOTE OF CAUTION

It is often queried how a type of schizophrenia which has been known to progress relentlessly to deterioration and often poorly responsive to treatment be called a 'simple' schizophrenia. Though psychiatry literature has not raised the issue, discussions at seminars and clinical fora have tended to call such a terminology a misnomer for such a 'complicated' picture, forgetting the fact that the same person who gave us the term schizophrenias also coined the 's imple ' term. Search into psychiatric literature failed to give the reason for Bleuler's choice of this term, but the answer is found in the English dictionary (Concise Oxford Dictionary; Allen, 1990). Several editions of the dictionary defined the word 'simple' variously, some of which seemed to solve this simple issue.