[The mystery of schizophrenia. The role of a preventive approach in the treatment of mental illness].

Despite decades of research, there is still a disquieting amount of unanswered questions concerning the genesis as well as the efficient therapy of schizophrenia. The classic approaches emphasizing genetic and family influences were followed by more comprehensive ones that focus on the interplay between the cognitive and the emotional social symptoms of the illness. The demand-access-matching model and, perhaps even more clearly, the cognitive appraisal model seek to integrate biological and early childhood experience factors and show their impact on cognitive as well as emotional functioning. The health-psychosis-continuum model, on the other hand, offers a possible answer to the quantity-quality dilemma of psychotic symptoms. Following a review of the different approaches as well as recent findings in research, the present study outlines a possible route to the development of mental illness starting from a genetically determined more general vulnerability leading to non-specific cognitive dysfunct on in early childhood on to an impaired synchronicity finally leading to a distancing from external reality in the form of overt psychotic symptoms. The second part of the study focuses on the advantages and difficulties of the different therapeutic approaches to mental illness. Based on these approaches, the study outlines an alternative preventive model that, rather than focusing on the former dichotomies lays the emphasis on the early identification and detection of non-specific childhood cognitive dysfunction and early intervention to correct these. These interventions certainly require the close cooperation between psychologists, psychiatrists and special education experts.