Schizophrenia

THE CONDITION

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder, which generally develops in early adulthood and can lead to profound changes in personality and behaviour. The condition is characterized by abnormal social behavior and failure to understand what is real.

Schizophrenia was first described as a distinct syndrome affecting young people by Bénédict Morel in 1853, termed démence précoce (literally 'early dementia').

A painting that explains what a person with schizophrenia experiences.

In 1893 German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin introduced a new distinction in the classification of mental disorders dividing them into two groups, "dementia praecox" (schizophrenia) and "manic - depressive insanity". Kraepelin believed that dementia praecox was primarily a disease of the brain, different from other forms of dementia such as Alzheimer's disease which usually happen later in life.

Although the Nazis sterilized or murdered over three quarters of all schizophrenics in Germany (about 220,000 - 269,000 people), there were no long-term effects on subsequent rates of schizophrenia in the country. In fact, post World War II rates were unexpectedly high.

The Soviet Union created a fake mental disorder (Sluggish Schizophrenia) to arrest anyone who criticized the leadership until the 1970s.

The voices schizophrenics hear are actually their own subvocal speech. This is why it's so common for schizophrenics to believe their minds are being read.

Schizophrenia's voices/hallucinations are shaped by culture. Americans with schizophrenia tend to have more paranoid and harsher voices/hallucinations. In Africa and India people with schizophrenia tend to have more playful and positive voices.

Some people with schizophrenia who were born deaf see visual hallucinations of disembodied hands signing to them, or lips making words, as opposed to "hearing" voices.

There's not a single case of someone who was born blind developing schizophrenia.

People with schizophrenia have the ability to tickle themselves.

Newborns with a vitamin D deficiency have a 44 percent increased risk of being diagnosed with schizophrenia as adults compared to those with normal vitamin D levels.

Schizophrenic voices are shaped by local culture. Patients in America hear voices asking them to do violent things whereas in Africa and India the voices they hear are usually of dead relatives or nice voices offering comfort.

The picture below is a cloth embroidered by a person with schizophrenia. This is a written example of a "word salad"; a meaningless mixture of words and phrases demonstrating the disorganized thinking caused by the disorder.

By cometstarmoon - originally posted to Flickr as Embroidered Schizophrenia

People with schizophrenia have the ability to tickle themselves.

People who grow up in cities are twice as likely to develop schizophrenia, even when controlling for drug use and ethnicity.

FAMOUS SCHIZOPHRENICS IN HISTORY

Charles VI of France (1368 – 1422), suffered from bouts of madness, probably schizophrenia. His doctors tried everything from exorcism to trepanning to cure him.

Charles VI  by Master of Boucicaut (1412).

In 1889, after the completion of Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche's health rapidly declined and is said to have tearfully embraced a horse in Turin because it had been beaten by its owner. He was taken back to his room and spent several days in a state of ecstasy writing letters to various friends, signing them Dionysus. He gradually became less coherent and almost entirely uncommunicative. Nietzsche was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and never recovered.

Daniel Paul Schreber (July 25, 1842 – April 14, 1911) was a German judge who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Schreber believed he was receiving cosmic rays through his anal glands by God in order to transform him into a woman so that he could herald and breed a new race. He described his mental illness in his book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, an account which served as Sigmund's Freud's primary source to understand the condition.

Albert Einstein's second son Eduard was born in 1908. Eduard was a talented student but suffered from schizophrenia, and his mental health issues became apparent during his late teenage years. His condition worsened over time, leading to his institutionalization. Eduard spent much of his life in psychiatric clinics, including the Burghölzli Psychiatric Clinic in Zurich, Switzerland where he died aged 55 in 1965.

Buddy Bolden (September 6, 1877 – November 4, 1931), the African-American cornetist credited with creating the musical innovations that would lead to the birth of Jazz, Bolden had acute schizophrenia and was permanently committed to a mental institution at age 30.

Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett was in the same circle of artists as renowned Irish writer James Joyce. However, Beckett's close relationship with Joyce and his family cooled, when he rejected the advances of Joyce's daughter Lucia owing to her progressing schizophrenia.

The novelist Scott F Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda, was a schizophrenic. She was confined to an expensive asylum in North Carolina from 1936 to her death in 1948 in a fire at her asylum. Scott was loyal, not divorcing Zelda and visiting her in hospital.

Zelda Fitzgerald self-portrait, watercolor, probably painted in the early 1940s

David Bowie's schizophrenic half-brother Terry killed himself in 1985 when he escaped the grounds of the mental hospital where he was staying and put his head in the way of an oncoming train.. His 1993 song "Jump They Say" deals with Bowie's feelings about his brother and the factors that lead to his mental illness.