Schizophrenia: Stigma and the Impact of Literature.

Abstract

I was diagnosed with schizophrenia on February 21, 1995, I was 22 years old, and my reaction was initially a shock. Still, within the parameters of coping with such news, the word “mad” surfaced in my mind. It was not just the word; my mind actually did a complete reversion to my childhood, particularly to 2 stories: Alice in Wonderland and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. My focus was the mad hatter parties, in particular, the absurdity of unbirthdays and the trivialization of madness. I was pretty amazed that my initial reaction was to revert to Carroll’s works. I realized that the terminology used to refer to the “madness” in the novel was not as outdated as it may seem. The terms are easily transferable to modern day psychology. The question remained: how would a “mad hatter” or being “mad as a hare” be described in 21st century vocabulary? Back to my original inspirations Jekyll and Hyde and Alice in Wonderland, these instantiate the 2 main forms of modern ignorance regarding mental health. People still regard it as comical, or even dangerous. Those who read Carroll may not realize that they are making that kind of association, but they are; the 2 notions of madness are equally misleading. So why does this trivialization of madness matter? Certainly, there is an aspect of madness that may seem to some as interesting in lieu of the fact that they do not know what is really at stake. I, for one, realized after understanding my condition that my brain tended to feel responsible for the entire world around me; even issues that had nothing to do with me would prompt me to think that I was responsible. I felt that I had caused September 11. I was egocentric and, to a point, narcissistic without the pedantry; it was just the way my brain reacted. Surely my thoughts would have made amazing comedy sketches. Yet, there is so much more than just the irrational thinking: all thinking comes from a common source—what source were my thoughts coming from? Was it guilt? Was it masochism? Was it a fear of God, or a fear of myself? What was the problem with the Mad Hatter? What was his schema—that source of thoughts, that thought soup, that leaked his thought into such expressions to the world? What follows is the thought process I went through to understand the stigma.