Thylacine, Narrad, all I can say is that I agree with you here. A close friend of mine suffered from schizophrenia, and he went through quite enough without having to deal with people misunderstanding his condition.
May I add “antisocial” to the list of misused psychological labels?
“Why don’t you go out more? You’re so antisocial!”
Um, if I were, I think I’d be a little more dangerous. Right now, I don’t think you should consider my preference for staying home a threat to your well-being. Well, not until I start building bombs in the basement or practicing your signature.
Seems to me that would be yet another example of catering to the lowest common denominator - or to put it differently, dumbing down. That would also imply having to coin another term for schizophrenia. I was under the impression that the mission here was to combat ignorance, not cater to it. [shrug]
True, Thylacine.
I used to be schizophrenic, but WE’RE ok now.
Nothing to add, but me too!
Great read there Narrad thanks for the headsup. I certainly do not want to get in that sort of argument here and now so will back away from RTFirefly slowly ;).
It might help folks to understand:
DID: Dissociative Identity Disorder; used to be called MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder). The alter(s) share(s) a body/mind with you and you’re typically unaware of it unless you’re told. I’ve seen the switch first-hand several times (British female non-smoker to Iowan male smoker and back). Very interesting to observe if you’ve never before, and it cleared up once and for all any issues I had with the validity of the condition. And this was one of those “normally functioning people”. There was no clear indication from anyone thatany sort of trauma had caused the alter to start appearing. The woman (she was in control of the body for the majority of the time, and it was definitely a female body) was attending classes, all that. I felt bad for the alter, too; one time when he appeared he told me he had to be at UCLA the next day for a tryout for theater. Even told me his name. I couldn’t find anything to substantiate what he was telling me, though if anyone has a suggestion on how to locate Justin Cob (or Cobb; never did figure out the spelling) from Iowa at UCLA trying out for Agamemnon, that sure would answer a whole lot of questions…
As a sort of really interesting sidenote, while Justin was straight, seemed to either not care about religion or be one of those C&E Christians and smoked, Amy didn’t smoke, was a pagan and a lesbian. Curiouser and curiouser. The last time I saw her, incidentally, she had to meet a friend of Justin’s (he had online friends just as she did) and explain to her the whole thing.
Schizophrenia: literally (IIRC) “split mind” because of, again IIRC, the whole “talking to himself/hitting himself” aspect of the illness that is so commonly included in portrayals of individuals with the illness in the fictional media. However, let’s also remember that one need not talk to one’s self to be classified schizophrenic. There’s also catatonia, delusional behavior, and other things all in that big categorization.
I get the West Coast feeds of the major networks on my satellite dish and have just seen this commercial about schizophrenia:
A man is playing with his daughter in the park. It’s a sunny day and everyone is happy. However, there’s actually NOBODY there! The man is apparently hallucinating and hearing voices. The commercial is for some sort of drug study in California.
Can someone explain this?
Folks, I’m with RTF: the battle over “schizophrenia” was lost a couple of generations ago. That it’s unfortunate isn’t in dispute; but it’s one of a long line of misuses that become established uses because they overwhelm. RTF’s analysis of the linguists, and the unusual circumstances the term finds itself in, still holds quite nicely.
Schizophrenics often have hallucinations. The most common is the auditory type, but there are some that have visual hallucinations. I imagine the point of the commercial was to show how some schizophrenics see the world. And pushing a drug that’s intended for schizophrenics.
I think this is a perfectly acceptable use of the term so long as the context is obviously non-clinical. Although “antisocial” has a precise psychological meaning it can also be used simply a a synonym for “unsociable”, just as “depressed” can be used to mean “sad” rather than “clinically depressed”.
Sidebar: I was once taken to task by a psych major for referring to myself as “anti-social” in a rant about my dislike for dorm socials. I’m against socials, so I’m anti-social, get it? She didn’t. But she was an idiot who eventually flunked out of school.
Eh, you’re probably right…I would prefer “nonsocial” to “antisocial,” myself, because I’m not against society. I was a psych major, too, FWIW. 
Split personality?
It is hard enough to deal with one flawed personality.
No thank you I don’t need another one. 0887
Oxy: thanks!
ffabris: I agree that we’re here to fight ignorance, and that’s exactly my point. Because it can be just as ignorant to refuse to acknowledge when you’re wasting large amounts of your limited resources on a comparatively unimportant (and likely lost) battle, and to continue fighting it to the detriment of your true mission.
In this case the unimportant and lost battle (IMHO, at least) is over schizophrenia the term, and the true mission is educating people about schizophrenia the badly misunderstood mental health disorder.
Fighting ignorance concerning the latter is of genuine importance to the afflicted and those who are close to them. Which is why it kinda bothers me that their advocates, who really don’t have unlimited resources, insist on fighting their way through the unimportant and seemingly unwinnable battle over the term, on their way to fighting ignorance over the disorder.
Like I said, I don’t have a dog in this fight. But I had to take issue with the notion that my stance somehow constituted giving in, in the battle against ignorance.
There’s certainly precedent for changing names of disorders, usually in favor of something clearer than the original. For example, which is less ambiguous: Hyperkinetic Syndrome (valid until the DSM-III, 1980), or Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (first appearance in DSM-IV, 1994)? The latter, I’d say - even though it’s pretty unwieldy. And that, I think, is what RTF is talking about: create a name that actually describes the condition clearly, and that will take care of at least part of the problem of public understanding.
I believe the misunderstanding is more prevalent in North America than it is here in Australia for instance. I cannot speak for other countries but I would be interested to find out. I do not believe we should pander to the ignorance perpetuated by the media of one land if my suspicions are correct.
I’m stating upfront that I’m a psych major. So feel free to ignore anything I say. We Psych majors are an annoying bunch.
I wrote a research paper entitled “Disassosiative Identity Disorder as an Iatrogenic Disease” in which I did a damn good job of making the argument that DID/MPD is radically over-diagnosed, when people are in fact suffering from schizophrenia. There are a few reasons for this, both disorders have the sufferors hearing “voices.” The most insideous reason is that while Schizophrenia has some great drugs to treat the organic side and some proven thereputic methods to help the sufferor deal with their illness (which usually hits in the young to mid 20s…), DID/MPD has no real medical treatment and often involves long and involved psychothereputic threatment, which is way more expensive on the long road than threating someone with medication. links: http://www.psycom.net/mchugh.html
http://fmsf.com/issd.html (that one’s about Judith Peterson, who quite literally was pulling the insurance scam outlined above)
Schizophrenia has a lot of unfair stigma attached to it. My father, a mental health counciler, nearly flipped his lid when ER had a schizophrenic patient kill a doctor on the show. Dad listed off a bunch of statistics I can’t remember, something about 1% of the population are schizophrenic, and of those 11% commit vioent crimes, which is so far below that of the general public, it’s laughable. I wish I could find actual stats, but I’m late to meet the self-same Dad for our weekly pool night. From this site:
Frankly, schizophrenia is to me the most frightening of mental illnesses, because most schizophrenics KNOW they are seeing or hearing things that aren’t there. The idea of not being able to trust your senses anymore scares the hell out of me. If you can’t trust what you see, what can you trust? Plus, the fact that onset is in your 20s, when you’re more or less set in who you are…yikes.
I admire anyone who is struggling with it.
RTFirefly, first of all, I need to clarify that I meant no offense, and I’m sorry if it sounded that way.
The point I was trying to make is that fighting ignorance is important to me at all levels, be it knowledge about a mental disorder, or about correct terminology. I try to fight ignorance at all levels.
I don’t mean to derail the thread, but I’d like to give an example that has irked me for many years: I keep running across sites which state something like “we offer video tapes in US (VHS) and European (PAL) standards.” Ehm, the first is a video tape recorder standard, the other is a TV signal standard … apples and penguins.
If I were to let that go, that would imply that I am ok with renaming NTSC to VHS - and what do we then call VHS tapes and recorders? By the same token, I object to “schizophrenia” being used to replace DID/MPD.
And whatever you call it the jokes aren’t funny.
I was just thinking about all the epilepsy jokes we used to tell at school and how hurtful they were to the kids with epilepsy. I am sure that if someone popped up here with one of them as a sig file they would be learning pretty fast that it is not acceptable.
—It actually is split personality.—
Which is a very apt name for it really. I think that, psychologically, the disorderness comes from an inability to make a distinction between errant thoughts and ones own thoughts. You come to disassociate from the errant thoughts that are actually yours… and because of this failure to recogize that they are your own, they get radically off track and disassociated from the rest of your personality: part of your own internal monolouge becomes “voices” or images. It’s almost like when you are dreaming, and you half realize you can control it: but this realization is itself a dream, and events don’t seem to unfold as you command them to.
I also really wish people would stop joking about OCD too. If anyone had every experienced how excruciatingly painful and horrible it is to have OCD (to litterally live almost every moment of their lives in a state of fear that they can even KNOW is totally irrational and pointless, but still cannot fight), they wouldn’t dare joke, or associate it with random repeated actions like jiggling. OCD isn’t about desire, it’s about FEAR.