Schizophrenia : Road to Ability
Nearly in middle of my OPD a young female walks up to me along with her mother (a schizophrenia patient). I made few interactions about her condition and as I started writing the prescription, the accompanying female enquired “doctor is schizophrenia, a spilt personality disorder”? She further told me that this was what she read on internet and the mother had dual personality, of which the other personality only appears when medicine gets stopped. Her statement clearly stated that the people had a distorted concept, of a major mental illness like schizophrenia, which affects nearly one percent of world’s population. On 24 Apr 1908, the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler coined the term 'schizophrenia’, which was derived from the Greek words schizo (‘split’) and phren (‘mind’). The term was intended to be used for denoting ‘loosening’ of thoughts and feelings, but unfortunately it was mistakenly read as “split in personality”. Split personality is categorized in ICD 10 under dis...