Katrina Karkazis and Ellen Feder from the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University in their thought provoking piece "The art of medicine-naming the problem: disorders and their meanings" published in The Lancet, proposed that an expansive view of illness points to something beyond clinical pathology. It includes the social meanings embedded in the particular medical condition. They noted:
"We are accustomed to thinking about the suffering wrought by illness as a matter of its physical aspects and its treatment. There are cases, however in which the medical naming of illness and its attendant social meaning can have equally harmful effects" (p. 2016). I believe this applies to the highly stigmatizing term "schizophrenia."