About 10 years ago, I started reading the Dark Tower series by Stephen King. What an amazing series! I loved every bit of it, and afterwards held the series in high regard.
Having lost my old books, I've recently felt like reading the series again and went out and brought all the books at once. I read the first book, and it was as fantastic as I remembered. Then i started on the second book...
5 years ago I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. A major character is introduced in the second book, and that character happens to be "schizophrenic". I put it in quotation marks, because this is how the book describes it:
"The perfect schizophrenic - if there was such a person - would be a man or a woman not only unaware of his other persona(e), but one unaware that anything at all was amiss in his or her life."
Reading this felt like a massive blow to the stomach, and I almost wanted to put the book down right there and then. Hopefully, you know that this isn't a description of schizophrenia at all, but rather Multiple Personality Disorder. Obviously, I don't expect everyone to know the ins and outs of every mental illness, but... About 1% of the population is schizophrenic. It's a devestating mental illness, which have a huge impact of those of us who suffer from it. Multiple Personality Disorder, on the other hand, is a mental illness that while quite frequent in fiction, have a substanstial lack of evidence for whether it exists at all - If it does, it is extremely rare.
If it was just a random person confusing these two illnesses, it would be one thing. But really, if you're writing a book where a character is suffering from an illness, I would expect you to just do the most basic research about said illness. It seems like Stephen forgot to do so.
Schizophrenia is often confused with MPD for a reason most people are even unaware of - Schizophrenia is greek and means "Split Mind". Split mind does NOT mean multiple personalities, rather it refers to how a schizophrenics mind can be "split" from reality, eg. experiencing things that are not there.
Even on these very forums, I see the word schizophrenic misused so often. If a person or a company does one thing, while really wanting to do something else, it's suddenly a "schizophrenic" situation. No. Schizophrenia is many things (infact, it's a spectrum). It's symptoms are split it to two different groups.
The first is positive symptoms, but because they have a positive influence on the ill person, but because they "add" something that is not present in a healthy individual - Things such as halucinations, delusions and paranoia. These symptoms are not always present, and if a schizophrenic is suffering hard from these symptoms, he is said to be psychotic, a state that is not permanent but in very few cases, but rather temporary. Positive symptoms reacts well to medicine.
The second group of symptoms are called negative, because the schizophrenic lacks or have less of something otherwise present in healthy individuals. For instance, lack of motivation, poverty of speech, decreased interest in being social, flat emotions, inability to experience joy and so on. These symptoms cannot really be treated with medicine, and therefor have a substanstial bigger impact on most schizophrenics quality of life than positive symptoms.
Hopefully, you now won't do the same mistake as Stephen King did! Sorry for the rant.
For discussion value, have you every revisited old content and suddenly noticed all the flaws you was ignorant off before?
Having lost my old books, I've recently felt like reading the series again and went out and brought all the books at once. I read the first book, and it was as fantastic as I remembered. Then i started on the second book...
5 years ago I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. A major character is introduced in the second book, and that character happens to be "schizophrenic". I put it in quotation marks, because this is how the book describes it:
"The perfect schizophrenic - if there was such a person - would be a man or a woman not only unaware of his other persona(e), but one unaware that anything at all was amiss in his or her life."
Reading this felt like a massive blow to the stomach, and I almost wanted to put the book down right there and then. Hopefully, you know that this isn't a description of schizophrenia at all, but rather Multiple Personality Disorder. Obviously, I don't expect everyone to know the ins and outs of every mental illness, but... About 1% of the population is schizophrenic. It's a devestating mental illness, which have a huge impact of those of us who suffer from it. Multiple Personality Disorder, on the other hand, is a mental illness that while quite frequent in fiction, have a substanstial lack of evidence for whether it exists at all - If it does, it is extremely rare.
If it was just a random person confusing these two illnesses, it would be one thing. But really, if you're writing a book where a character is suffering from an illness, I would expect you to just do the most basic research about said illness. It seems like Stephen forgot to do so.
Schizophrenia is often confused with MPD for a reason most people are even unaware of - Schizophrenia is greek and means "Split Mind". Split mind does NOT mean multiple personalities, rather it refers to how a schizophrenics mind can be "split" from reality, eg. experiencing things that are not there.
Even on these very forums, I see the word schizophrenic misused so often. If a person or a company does one thing, while really wanting to do something else, it's suddenly a "schizophrenic" situation. No. Schizophrenia is many things (infact, it's a spectrum). It's symptoms are split it to two different groups.
The first is positive symptoms, but because they have a positive influence on the ill person, but because they "add" something that is not present in a healthy individual - Things such as halucinations, delusions and paranoia. These symptoms are not always present, and if a schizophrenic is suffering hard from these symptoms, he is said to be psychotic, a state that is not permanent but in very few cases, but rather temporary. Positive symptoms reacts well to medicine.
The second group of symptoms are called negative, because the schizophrenic lacks or have less of something otherwise present in healthy individuals. For instance, lack of motivation, poverty of speech, decreased interest in being social, flat emotions, inability to experience joy and so on. These symptoms cannot really be treated with medicine, and therefor have a substanstial bigger impact on most schizophrenics quality of life than positive symptoms.
Hopefully, you now won't do the same mistake as Stephen King did! Sorry for the rant.
For discussion value, have you every revisited old content and suddenly noticed all the flaws you was ignorant off before?
