Japan's psychiatric society decided Saturday to change the Japanese name of schizophrenia to help dispel prejudice against people with the disorder, sources close to the society said.

The Japanese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology will announce the change of the name from "seishin bunretsu byo" (split-mind disorder) to "togo shiccho sho" (loss of coordination disorder) at the World Congress of Psychiatry to be held late August in Yokohama, they said.

Schizophrenia is typically characterized by disorganized speech and behavior, hallucinations and delusions. While the cause of the disorder is not known, a dominant theory attributes the illness to an imbalance of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain.

The decision, made at a meeting of directors in Tokyo, follows requests from schizophrenic patients and their families, who say the current name foments social prejudice by creating the impression that the patients' minds are actually split, according to the sources.

The society had adopted the current name in 1937 based on a translation of schizophrenie, the German name for the disorder, which literally means split mind.

The German name was created by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1911 to describe the dissociative condition in which patients are unable to make conceptual links between things like hot weather and the sun.

In 1993, the National Federation of Families with Mentally Ill in Japan requested the psychiatric society change the name of the illness. After studying the request for five years, the society decided in 2000 to change the name.

Last October, the society and the families' federation jointly asked the general public to select a new name from proposals that included "togo shiccho sho," another interpretation of Schizophrenie, "sukizofurenia," the Japanese phonetical pronunciation of schizophrenia, and Kraepelin-Bleuler syndrome, which is based on the names of Bleuler and German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, who studied the disease.

Of the 2,400 or so recommendations received, about 40 percent supported the name togo shiccho sho.

In addition to canvassing the public, the society also held a hearing in November to gather the opinions of lawyers and former patients.

There are an estimated 700,000 schizophrenic patients in Japan, and about 200,000 are inpatients.

The psychiatric society says that more than half of the patients will be able to return to their normal lives after undergoing medical treatment.