The True Aetiology and Treatments of Schizophrenia
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Schizophrenia lacks a confirmed fundamental aetiology. Dominant psychiatric frameworks invoke polygenic vulnerability, environmental risk factors and brain-network anomalies, yet none have been validated as the root cause. This paper proposes a novel psychogenic mechanism: severe, cumulative self-negation of thought erodes confidence in the validity of internally generated cognitive directives and reduces their perceived value. Once the value of these thought-derived directives falls below that of innate physiological cravings, primitive psychological desires and the drive to release repressed emotion, human self-interested nature triggers the discharge of these instinctive urges outside cognitive regulation. Progressive self-negation may lead the brain to judge its own rational faculty as intrinsically defective, gradually disengaging active deliberation and self-restraint and entering a sleep-like state of reduced conscious control. This yields a blank, disorganised mental state, enables the spontaneous eruption of raw impulses and emotional outbursts, and explains characteristic manifestations of schizophrenia including hallucinations. Accordingly, the core intervention and preventive strategy for this subtype is confidence reconstruction through sustained positive affirmation; prolonged hospitalisation, by contrast, may reinforce cognitive self-devaluation and worsen symptoms. This logically deduced theory provides an alternative pathogenic framework and a non-pharmacological therapeutic direction for schizophrenia.
Author: Chen, Zhiguo
Language: English
Subfield: Psychiatry and Mental health
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225808321
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