Hermeneutics and schizophrenia

Hermeneutics is a concept I'm still getting my head round. In the
medical sense it's about whether you know what something is is what it is.

It looks like a donkey, brays like a donkey and sounds like a donkey. Is
it a donkey? Alternatively if a person looks like they're gay, talks
like they're gay and has the mannerisms of gay people are they gay?

To me the answer is I don't know. That's my answer anyway. To a doctor
it's about whether a person has a disease or not, and it's particularly
relevant in the quasi-science of mental health.

Richard Bentall in Madness explained notes the results from
poly-diagnostic studies, studies where different methods of diagnosis
are used and evaluated.
The sutides are usually done on schizophrenia and the evidence is
pretty damning for the 'science' of psychiatry (which he calls a
pseudoscience echoing Thomas Szaz's similar observation in the 20th
century). Psychiatrists simply don't reliably diagnose schizophrenia.
The supposed illness is meant to be a brain disorder yet they can't
identify it nor are there any objective tests. The diagnostic criteria
and the interviewing techniques they use have very high levels of comedy
value when it comes to anything scientific (one of the examinations asks
to look at how a person dresses. If they dress inappropriately this,
apparently, may be a symptom of a brain disorder however the medical
text book advises that people who don't dress 'abnormally' might also
have schizophrenia. lol.)

But then what the fuck is schizophrenia? Whenever I do any writing to
MPs or other professional work I always use the language "person with a
diagnosis of schizophrenia" rather than "schizophrenic" but not for any
politically correct bullshit reason. The diagnosis of schizophrenia as
it's used in practice is significantly different from any concern about
a brain disease that produces a hallucinatory or delusional internal
experience of conscious that may lead to certain behavioural symptoms.

Schizophrenia is the most studied true mental illness. The best of
positivistic science has been applied to it's study. The greatest minds
have tussled with trying to understand, explain and 'treat' it. Yet the
supposed brain disorder is diagnosed disproportinately in black men in
the UK and US, but not in the Caribbean. Clearly UK doctors can't tell
the difference between a donkey and a fucking lama, or perhaps
psychiatrists are using the diagnosis for a different purpose in the UK
and US. The diagnosis invariably means treatment with antipsychotics.
The over-diagnosis rate of schizophrenia in black men is 9 times. Ali G
asks the important question: is it cause I is black?
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