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The International  Study of Schizophrenia (ISoS) is the outgrowth of a series of epidemiological studies of cross-national variations in severe psychiatric disorder begun by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1966 with the International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia (IPSS). That original effort yielded the extraordinary – and skeptically received – finding that subjects in the developing world were generally better off than their counterparts in the developed world. Early findings from a later (1976), more rigorously designed study (Determinants of Outcome of Severe Mental Disorders, or DOSMeD) appeared to be consonant. But even in these preliminary reports, the convention of dividing research centers into crude categories of “developing” and “developed” was challenged by considerable variation within centers. ISoS revisits those provisional findings armed with the results of another decade and a half of follow-up data, collected from 1991 to 1997.

Initial results of ISoS were published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2001; a full volume (Recovery from Schizophrenia – An International Perspective) was published in early 2007 by Oxford University Press. That volume attends much more closely to intra-cultural variation as well as cross-cultural similarities and differences. The bulk of the book consists of detailed portraits of both the individual participating centers and the outcomes of their patient cohorts. These portraits are flanked by a set of introductory and synoptic chapters – laying out both the genealogy and design of ISoS and synthesizing its major findings – and a concluding reprise.

Participating centers in Recovery from Schizophrenia include three of the original IPSS centers, eight of the original 12 DOSMeD centers, and three centers from a WHO Disability Assessment Study. The international research team also was able to add three additional centers from Southeast Asia, substantially expanding the geographic scope and cultural coverage of the inquiry. In all, sufficient data for analysis was collected on 1043 individuals, from eighteen study cohorts scattered across sixteen field research centers. Follow-up times ranged from 12 to 26 years.

The discursive chapters and center-specific analyses in Recovery from Schizophrenia are supplemented by a large set of tables that present the data in fine-grained fashion, permitting further independent analysis. This website deepens and extends the supporting data resources of ISoS. 

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