I was commenting on another blog earlier when it struck me that I had way more to say about this than would be appropriate for a short comment on someone else’s blog.
So, with apologies to accordingtoabi@wordpress.com (don’t ask me, I can’t seem to copy paste her page here, nor my comment! Newbie! Stupidie!) here’s an extended version.
Abi was talking about someone she’d known on and off for several years being very confrontational and accusatory about seeing her recently with her walking stick. He said it was bullshit, as if she was making up her need for it.
I said she should have called her post, “The Stick And The Prick”.
Her post was also about how pain experienced as short lived accident-type trauma by what I call “normals” is invariably subject to huge wodges of sympathy and support for the duration, whilst the sort of long term, endless…
In commenting on a Des Moines radio show about Roberts’ dissension from the decision regarding same-sex marriage and his decision in favor of the Affordable Care Act, Huckabee said that Roberts, “apparently needs medication for schizophrenia.”
The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) didn’t take too kindly to the attempt to use schizophrenia as a slur or to the mischaracterization of schizophrenia as involving a split personality, noting in a news release that
“Schizophrenia is a mental illness that interferes with a person’s ability to think clearly, manage emotions, make decisions and relate to others. It affects about 1% of Americans. The average age of onset tends to be in the late teens to early 20s for men and the late 20s to early 30s for women. It does not mean that a person has a ‘split’ or multiple personalities.”
In fact, the disorder associated with multiple personalities has a name, dissociative identity disorder. While the two can have overlap of some symptoms, including auditory and visual hallucinations, delusions are the primary symptom that characterize schizophrenia whereas two or more distinct personalities constitute the main feature of dissociative identity disorder.
The latter remains a controversial diagnosis and is thought to trace to extreme and often repeated traumatic experiences that lead the person with the condition to wall off the recollections of those experiences in a separate personality or personalities. It might be more common in girls and women than in males.
Schizophrenia, on the other hand, has a genetic component with a pretty high rate of co-occurrence in identical twins and is equally common in men and women. It can involve a lifelong need to manage delusions and hallucinations but violence is not, as seems to be a popular perception, a key feature. Suicide, however, is devastatingly common, and occurs at a rate of up to 10% of young men with schizophrenia.
This What I thought I knew This What I thought was true This I understood This In the deep wood This Ah there I stood a child so fair This On a certain square This Down the dirty stairs This To see the table set This With golden chairs This Ah to follow, follow, follow, follow there
Art by Rob Goldstein 