Jim van Os

Career

Van Os studied medicine in Amsterdam, psychiatry in Jakarta, Casablanca, Bordeaux and London, and subsequently epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

He is professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychology at Maastricht University Medical Centre, and visiting professor at the Division of Psychological Medicine, Institute of Psychiatry, DeCrespigny Park, London, United Kingdom.

In 2011 he was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Theory regarding schizophrenia

In 2009, van Os proposed the retirement of the diagnosis of schizophrenia, citing its lack of validity and the risk of fundamental attribution error associated with the label. The latter could cause difficulties on the part of the clinician with communicating with the diagnosed person due to the former's holding of erroneous preconceptions associated with the label.

In its place, van Os proposed a broad and general syndromal definition, more suited to personal diagnosis which would reduce attribution error, citing previous work by other researchers that explains psychosis as aberrant salience regulation.

He explained his views in a 2014 TED talk, and appeared on the Thomson-Reuter Web of Science list of 'the world’s most influential scientific minds of our time' (2014/2015). and 2015, co-authored an article in a national newspaper suggesting 'schizo-labels' should be abandoned and replaced by more scientific and patient-friendly terminology. The week after, his colleagues Rene Kahn, Iris Sommer and Damiaan Denys published a counter-article, labelling Van Os and colleagues as 'antipsychiatrists'