Saturday, May 22, 2010
What's It All About?
The belief that schizophrenics have multiple personalities is really a confusion of combining two very distinct and differentiating disorders. Before the now universally used DSM-IV, and the DSM-III, schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder were not strongly differentiated in their diagnoses. When the DSM-III came out, the criteria for MPD and schizophrenia became very strict and more specific (Fink, 127). Due to the history of these disorders, the definition and mass assumption of what schizophrenia is has become increasingly blurred with a separate mental health problem. As quoted in the McNally article, “schizophrenia is probably the most misused psychological term in existence (69).” The misunderstanding of schizophrenics having MPD has aso provoked the idea that they have a split personality. This split personality myth is almost Jekyll and Hyde in theory; a fantastical view of what the mass population has created from the distorted perception from the media.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Well said! I've come across VAST amounts of media content that absolutely destroy the distinction between these two! I feel like American's treat it as some sort of isolated, unrealistic event only depicted to create extremes and drama while both are very real conditions that cause very different symptoms and problems; these in themselves are often unlike those depicted in movies and anecdotes anyhow.
ReplyDeleteThis is all very interesting stuff that I never knew. I feel like the media perpetuates a lot of myths, but this one in particular. Shows like law and order, CSI ,and pretty much any cop drama have all had a show with someone with schizophrenia on it. I also really like the layout of your blog, very nice!
ReplyDeleteWow, that's a topic that I had not thought about before. Now that I think about it, that differentiation does tend to blur in the media. One thing regarding your topic that I'm confused about: in my introduction to psychology class, we learned about dissociative identity disorder, which sounds very similar to multiple personality disorder. Do you know if they essentially the same thing? I hadn't heard of MPD before this.
ReplyDelete