As part of my master's degree in social work, I recently finished a class on assessing and diagnosing mental health disorders. I had some familiarity with mental health disorders from a year spent working with families who were homeless, learning about the effects of trauma on human trafficking victims, and a 496 hour practicum at a school for children with emotional disturbances. Yet, I was still a bit confused about schizophrenia and mostly thought of it as multiple personality disorder, aka "A Beautiful Mind." I learned that schizophrenia is a mental illness centering around psychosis, which means that you don't understand or acknowledge reality. Sometimes the psychosis is ongoing and other times psychotic episodes come and go between more lucid stretches. People with schizophrenia have delusions (false beliefs such as thinking that they are secretly Russian royalty) and hallucinations (false sensory experiences that are like hearing voices or seeing people who are not really there). It turns out that having "multiple personalities" is a different disorder entirely.
My teacher shared about a sensitivity exercise she experienced in which she put on headphones playing recordings which mimicked the negative and condemning voices often heard by people with schizophrenia. The voices told her what a terrible person she was, cursed her, and threatened her harm. While listening to the voices, she was instructed to fill out some forms and do a couple of other simple tasks while a staff person stood by and expressed frustration that she was "taking so long" to complete what she had been requested to do. It was terrible.
Most of us focus on the "mental" part of mental illness and not the "illness" part. There is an undeserved stigma attached to any impairment of mental processing. How foolish to think that we are "better" than someone simply because they are unhealthy. I don't think I am better than someone with cancer or Lyme disease or a broken femur--though the contrast makes me grateful for my health.
In class we learned about an incredible woman who lives with schizophrenia and helps break the stereotypes associated with it. She attended Yale and is a legal scholar and law professor at USC. Her story is told best in her own words. Here is a 15 minute TED Talk. You can read the interactive transcript here.
My teacher shared about a sensitivity exercise she experienced in which she put on headphones playing recordings which mimicked the negative and condemning voices often heard by people with schizophrenia. The voices told her what a terrible person she was, cursed her, and threatened her harm. While listening to the voices, she was instructed to fill out some forms and do a couple of other simple tasks while a staff person stood by and expressed frustration that she was "taking so long" to complete what she had been requested to do. It was terrible.
Most of us focus on the "mental" part of mental illness and not the "illness" part. There is an undeserved stigma attached to any impairment of mental processing. How foolish to think that we are "better" than someone simply because they are unhealthy. I don't think I am better than someone with cancer or Lyme disease or a broken femur--though the contrast makes me grateful for my health.
In class we learned about an incredible woman who lives with schizophrenia and helps break the stereotypes associated with it. She attended Yale and is a legal scholar and law professor at USC. Her story is told best in her own words. Here is a 15 minute TED Talk. You can read the interactive transcript here.
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