'schizophrenia'

[thymeoperator]

i have to say, i wasn't so keen on this book compared to 'the gunslinger' - i'm eager to see them get back on the road for the tower now.

the main thing, though, that was bugging me in this book - silly as this may be, to some - was that it kept saying odetta was schizophrenic, and she wasn't in any way schizophrenic. ms mod, is SK himself aware now, years on from when he wrote this, of the mistake? because i'd think future editions ought to be corrected - he's actually writing about dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder. DID and schiz. are totally different unrelated things. schiz is a nervous disorder to do with neurotransmitters, which involves hearing voices and being guided or controlled by imagined 'other' beings you're completely aware of and firmly believe are there talking to you - DID is being two separate personalities unaware of each other, complete with black-outs and false memories, etc. the way odetta is described in this book. and as someone who studies a lot of psychology, this actually put me off the book quite a lot - every time it mentioned schizophrenia my brain was screaming 'THAT'S NOT WHAT IT IS!!!'

[wally wonder]

can anyone say with any real authority how the mind works? the individual mind? so often the cure is a recipe for a pineapple upside-down cake when the particular cake pan in question reacts individually to the ingredients supplied.

i suppose it would put someone off, though, to have a specialized knowledge of something. chalk it up to eddie, maybe, eddie got it wrong. don't believe the story is a psychology textbook, nor does it take that position.

whenever someone comes on stage and announces they're there ready to arrange the world, i think, yeah, and at one point some of the greatest minds in the world thought everything revolved around them (and the earth they inhabited). nothing's really changed, in that regard. its survival of whoever can scream the loudest. be loud! be somebody! but yeah, i can see the point. been put off, myself, about stuff.

[thymeoperator]

no you can't say with authority how the mind works, but there have been enough studies on these things to know the most basic thing: that multiple personalities is not at all the same as schizophrenia, that schizophrenics don't report the same kinds of experiences at all, and that the chemical changes in schiz are not present in DID, and that in DID apparently they actually have different brain patterns when their heads are scanned during different 'personalities', etc. etc. they know enough about it to know these things, whatever they fully are, aren't at all related to each other. it was even one of the first things mentioned to me when i first took psych lessons because it's a common misconception, and i think it's probably not fair on schizophrenics, for instance, for their condition to be broadcast to the world in a totally misleading way, i.e. having the name put to symptoms that are totally irrelevant. i know if i read something describing, say, adhd and it kept being called tourette's, i'd think this was a gross injustice to people like me fighting for the rest of society to understand what tourette's is in the first place.

[BlackThorn]

Detta walker was extremely schizophrenic. I've had to deal with dementia all morning.

"They're out to get me" "They're putting things in the medicine" "They're poisoning me with noxious gas".

So yeah, stop complaining at King. Detta thought EVERYONE was out to get her. The ficticious character she created in her mind that she knew existed might be MPD, sure. It sounds like more of a Multiple Personality Disorder, I agree.

But thinking they're out to get you, thinking they're all against you.. making up unrealities to explain realities that don't exist...

This is both dillusional schizophrenia and paranoid schizophrenia.

One of my buddies used to tell me the bumps he had on the back of his head said "666", and they were carved there from the aliens that abducted him.

Detta explained that they posioned the meat. That they were abusing her, making her hurt, trying everything possible to humiliate her.

These things weren't happening. It was a broken defense mechanism in her mind causing all of it. It's been what I've been dealing with all morning, and it's to the point we're looking into permanent residential care for our loved one whom is otherwise fairly healthy, because of dementia and paranoia and making things exist in her mind when otherwise they would have no place existing.

So yes, she had a big case of multiple personality disorder. But that personality disorder, as well as the other, suffered from a very powerful case of dementia and paranoid schizophrenia.

Thank you for yelling at King. Please drive through.

[Doc Wilson]

Thymeoperator is correct, though its not so much an issue of science as much as nomenclature. Schizophrenia, the thought disorder, was described and named by Kraeplin long ago but somehow the word has always meant multiple personality in the popular mind, despite all efforts to correct it.

Perhaps Mr. King is using the word in the vernacular.

[thymeoperator]

Detta walker was extremely schizophrenic. I've had to deal with dementia all morning.

"They're out to get me" "They're putting things in the medicine" "They're poisoning me with noxious gas".

So yeah, stop complaining at King. Detta thought EVERYONE was out to get her. The ficticious character she created in her mind that she knew existed might be MPD, sure. It sounds like more of a Multiple Personality Disorder, I agree.

But thinking they're out to get you, thinking they're all against you.. making up unrealities to explain realities that don't exist...

This is both dillusional schizophrenia and paranoid schizophrenia.

One of my buddies used to tell me the bumps he had on the back of his head said "666", and they were carved there from the aliens that abducted him.

Detta explained that they posioned the meat. That they were abusing her, making her hurt, trying everything possible to humiliate her.

These things weren't happening. It was a broken defense mechanism in her mind causing all of it. It's been what I've been dealing with all morning, and it's to the point we're looking into permanent residential care for our loved one whom is otherwise fairly healthy, because of dementia and paranoia and making things exist in her mind when otherwise they would have no place existing.

So yes, she had a big case of multiple personality disorder. But that personality disorder, as well as the other, suffered from a very powerful case of dementia and paranoid schizophrenia.

Thank you for yelling at King. Please drive through.

i think you're taking this too personally! i'm not yelling at mr king, as you put it, i'm simply pointing out that it's very misleading misnaming a condition - explaining having multiple alters and black-outs as each alter takes over as schizophrenia when they don't share the same symptomology. i also would say that detta's paranoid re-imaginings of what must have happened to her seemed to me more like her trying desperately to come up with an explanation for the black-outs than anything else. but even if she had paranoid-schizophrenia, that's not what was being labelled as such in the book - in the book it was saying 'why does she act like two opposite people and have black-outs?' 'oh because she's got schizophrenia' it even referenced 'the three faces of eve' (may have got the number wrong in that title?) which is the story of someone with dissociative identity disorder.

so it's not me yelling at mr king, as you say - it's me pointing out there's a big error there that spoiled the experience for me, and i'm probably not the only person in the whole wide world who's thought that about it, and i would say for the sake of psychology and people who have these disorders it would make sense to correct the error one day. if i wrote something like that and got it wrong, personally i'd want to correct it some day.

[michal]

Sorry but... correcting the book? This is fiction, and fantasy-fiction at that, and the fun in this genre is that you can make up whatever you want. I feel, as a reader, that all that fussing about details (IE -the thread dealing with the inaccuracies in the structure of the car in Christin for example) are just missing the point. Enjoy the story. Love or hate the characters. Stop worrying about the fact that the rose was described as red while in New York the common roses are pink. What does it matter?

Plus the important thing is not if Odetta is a clinical schizophrenic, but that the other characters believe she is.

[thymeoperator]

i think that's totally missing the point. i'm going to chalk it all up to the issue not mattering to other people as much as it does for me, as i am someone who actually has experienced schizophrenia before and is very involved in all aspects of neurology and psychology. trust me, it matters. if an author spent a whole book saying in ww2 our main enemy was the communists, i think people would care more then - it really is no different, it's putting the wrong name to something and it perpetuates a mistake. as for correcting books - he revised all of 'the gunslinger' and rereleased it, it's not really that farfetched. i'm not really that interested in the views of people who don't feel any personal interest in the subject, to be honest - i'm just stating that as someone who DOES feel it, that actually ruined half the novel for me and i thought it ought to be pointed out. go ahead and criticise me all you want for feeling that way but it's a valid viewpoint and it'd be nice if other people could be more respectful of it. it's not coming way out of leftfield. i don't understand why it seemed the week after i posted somewhere else on here that i liked how friendly everyone was here, instead of getting all bitchy like on other forums, all of a sudden some people seemed so eager to trash other people's views on things. it is a shame. what i'm pointing out about this book isn't that crazy.

i think i'm going to ignore the board for a while, actually. it's just getting silly.

[michal]

Sorry you got offended thymeoperator, I assume this is just a touchy subject for you and as such you take responses here personally in stead of viewing them as a purely literary discussion of books many of us enjoyed.

We all have topics that push our buttons, but for me anyway, it was just another chat of a King related question.

And of course, I am sorry if you feel offended. It's just opinions and you know how the saying goes - everyone's got one.

I apologize for any pain this topic may have caused you, and I can only speak to myself but I am sure none of it was ill meant.

[thymeoperator]

i'm not hurt or personally offended - i mentioned this to you in a vm already but i'll say it again that it's just that i wasn't talking about this as a subject for debate, i was just pointing out that for someone like me that element of the book ruined the story for me. i even looked on google briefly to see if anyone else had commented on it and there are lots of people mentioning it in their reviews of the book and saying it was seriously irritating to them. i appreciate other people might disagree with me but i think there are other ways to word it and also that this wasn't a subject where that really matters. i was just pointing out an error - that's not a debatable issue, it IS an error, a big error, it's a fact.