Is Schizophrenia a Bad Idea

SLATE did a neat piece lately on the idea of schizophrenia.

To start from the beginning, the general definition of schizophrenia is a mental condition that splits the sufferer from reality -- delusions, sometimes hallucinations, paranoid ideations, and other such opacities between mind and world may be involved.

The diagnosis has been around for close to six score years.

Does that sound vague? Well -- it should. The vagueness is worsened by the popular use of "schizophrenic" to refer to split or multiple personalities in the same body. That idea is NEVER what professional psychologists or psychiatrists mean by the word.

The SLATE article goes further and suggests that the word "schizophrenia" does not in fact name any disease entity and is about to be abandoned by the pros.

We shall see.

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