Skip to main content
Full access
Taking Issue
Published Online: 1 June 2001

Ain't No Such Thing as a Schizophrenic

Practitioners of all disciplines who provide care and treatment to persons with mental illnesses, along with the recipients of these services and their families, unwittingly contribute to stigmatizing the very individuals we are trying to free from the myths and stereotypes of psychiatric disorders. Like a skin-borne pathogen, stigma passes among us with no more than a handshake, a hug, or a graze. We all keep this stigma alive by using the names of disorders to designate people.
Let me give you some examples. In June 1999 at the White House Conference on Mental Health—a remarkable event focused in part on ending stigma—a person with bipolar affective disorder was referred to as "a manic depressive." In an article in the New York Times magazine on May 23, 1999—an exposé focused on inadequate care of people with serious mental illness—Michael Winerip, an insightful and careful writer, labeled an individual with a diagnosis of schizophrenia as "a schizophrenic." Officially distributed materials for intensive training in dialectical behavior therapy refer to patients with diagnoses of borderline personality disorder as "borderlines."
Among physicians, psychiatrists are unique in their use of such terminology. Whereas referring to a person with a psychiatric disorder by the name of the disorder is common in psychiatry, it is uncommon in other branches of medicine. How often do you hear an individual being called "a lymphoma," "a fibroid uterus," or "an AIDS"? (Of course, a patient may be referred to as "a pain in the neck," but still this term does not refer to the individual's pain but to the effect of that individual on others!)
Medicine does have some significant exceptions, such as "she's a diabetic" and "he's a hypertensive." But even in these cases, the label does not refer to the person in the same way that "he's a schizophrenic" does. "Schizophrenic" provides the necessary structure from which to hang stigmatized images of a person—a lonely person with inadequate social skills and poor hygiene in one language, and a person who is bizarre, grubby, smelly, a street person, or a zombie in another language.
If we want to end stigma we need to start with ourselves. That's not to say that we should be quiet about the visual and verbal misrepresentations of persons with mental illnesses in highly visible media, such as cinema, advertisements, comic books, and video games. But others won't hear what we say until we ourselves hear it. Ain't no such thing as a schizophrenic.

Information & Authors

Information

Published In

Go to Psychiatric Services
Go to Psychiatric Services
Psychiatric Services
Pages: 715
PubMed: 11376215

History

Published online: 1 June 2001
Published in print: June 2001

Authors

Details

Jeffrey L. Geller, M.D., M.P.H.
professor of psychiatry and director of public-sector psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester

Metrics & Citations

Metrics

Citations

Export Citations

If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.

For more information or tips please see 'Downloading to a citation manager' in the Help menu.

Format
Citation style
Style
Copy to clipboard

View Options

View options

PDF/EPUB

View PDF/EPUB

Login options

Already a subscriber? Access your subscription through your login credentials or your institution for full access to this article.

Personal login Institutional Login Open Athens login
Purchase Options

Purchase this article to access the full text.

PPV Articles - Psychiatric Services

PPV Articles - Psychiatric Services

Not a subscriber?

Subscribe Now / Learn More

PsychiatryOnline subscription options offer access to the DSM-5-TR® library, books, journals, CME, and patient resources. This all-in-one virtual library provides psychiatrists and mental health professionals with key resources for diagnosis, treatment, research, and professional development.

Need more help? PsychiatryOnline Customer Service may be reached by emailing [email protected] or by calling 800-368-5777 (in the U.S.) or 703-907-7322 (outside the U.S.).

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share article link

Share