For decades, Linda Larson has been trying to distance herself from the diagnosis she was given as a teenager: schizophrenia. She accepts that she has the mental disorder but deeply resents the term’s stigma. People hear it and think, “violent, amoral, unhygienic,” she said.

Ms. Larson, 74, is part of a group trying to remove that association — by changing the name of the illness. The idea is that replacing the term “schizophrenia” with something less frightening and more descriptive will not only change how the public perceives people with the diagnosis, but also how these people see themselves.

Ms. Larson is a member of the Consumer Advisory Board of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, which is associated with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. The group has been working with psychiatrists at Harvard to build momentum for a name change, most recently through a national survey published in the journal Schizophrenia Research.

“That term over time has become so associated with hopelessness, with dangerousness, with volatile and erratic behavior, that doctors are afraid to use that term with people and their family members,” said Dr. Raquelle Mesholam-Gately, a Harvard psychologist and the lead author of the new paper. “And people who have the condition don’t want to be associated with that name.”

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