Diagnosis
- Craziness scares us because we are creatures who long for structure and sense; we divide the interminable days into years, months, and weeks.
- A diagnosis is comforting because it provides a framework - a community, a lineage - and, if luck is afoot, a treatment or cure. A diagnosis says that I am crazy, but in a particular way.
- Schizophrenia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5):
- A: Two or more of the following for a significant portion of time during a 1-month period:
- Delusions
- Hallucinations
- Disorganized speech
- Grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior (which can include excessive motor activity)
- Negative symptoms (ie diminished emotional expression or avolition)
- B: Markedly reduced function in one or more major areas, like work, interpersonal relations, or self care.
- C: Continuous signs of disturbance for at least 6 months.
- D: Ruled out schizoaffective disorder and depressive or bipolar disorder with psychotic features.
- E: Not due to drugs, medication, or another medical condition.
- F: If there is autism spectrum disorder or a childhood onset communication disorder, then prominent delusions or hallucinations.
- Medicine is an inexact science, but psychiatry is particularly so.
- Schizoaffective Disorder, Bipolar type, involves schizophrenic symptom in addition to a major depressive or manic mood episode
- Emil Kraepelin is credited with pinpointing the disorder he called "dementia praecox" in 1893, but the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler coined the word "schizophrenia" ("split mind", to address the loosening of associations that are common in the disorder) in 1908.
- People diagnosed with schizophrenia are more likely to be born in the winter than in the summer; perhaps due to maternal infection during pregnancy. Difficult births, obstetrical complications, and stressful events suffered by the mother, such as assault and war, are also correlated.
- Certain categories, as crude as they are, are still useful in capturing a group of individuals that probably have more in common in terms of etiology or basic mechanism than they are different. And certain disorders are better than others in that regard. So autism has proven to be a pretty useful thing. bipolar disorder has proven to be, I think, more useful then schizophrenia. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is probably one of the more specific ones. Major depression is problematic. Generalized anxiety disorder is very problematic.
- Schizophrenia's subtypes - paranoid, disorganized, catatonic, and undifferentiated - no longer exist in DSM-5, which means, among other things, that pop culture has lost "paranoid schizophrenia" as a diagnosis upon which to hang criminal acts
- One potential explanation suggests that the evolutionary development of speech, language, and creativity, while bestowing significant gifts, has "dragged" along less desirable genetic tendencies with it; from this perspective, schizophrenia is simply the price humanity pays for the ability to write hearrending operas and earthshaking speeches.
Toward a Pathology of the Possessed
High-Functioning
Yale Will Not Save You
The Choice of Children
On the Ward
The Slender Man, the Nothing, and Me
Reality, On-Screen
John Doe, Psychosis
Perdition Days
L'Appel du Vide
Chimayo
Beyong the Hedge
