Schizophrenia (pronounced skit-suh-free-nee-uh or skit-suh-freen-yuh)
(1) In psychiatry (and once called dementia praecox), a severe mental disorder characterized by some, but not necessarily all, of the following features: withdrawal from reality, illogical patterns of thinking, delusions, and hallucinations, and varying degrees of other emotional, behavioral, or in emotional blunting, intellectual deterioration, social isolation, disorganized speech and behavior, delusions, and hallucinations.
(2) A state characterized by the coexistence of contradictory or incompatible elements; informal behavior that appears to be motivated by contradictory or conflicting principles.
(3) In informal use, used to suggest a split personality, identity or other specific forms of dualism. In popular usage, the term is often confused with dissociative identity disorder (also known as multiple personality disorder).
1908: From the German Schizophrenie, (split mind), coined by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939) as an umbrella term covering a range of more or less severe mental disorders involving a breakdown of the relation between thought, emotion, and action and literally "a splitting of the mind", the construct being the Ancient Greek σχίζω (skhizein or skhízō) (to split), from the primitive Indo-European root skei (to cut, split apart), + φρήν (phrḗn) (genitive phrenos) (mind, heart, diaphragm) + -ia (the suffix from the Latin -ia and Ancient Greek -ία (-ía) & -εια (-eia), which forms abstract nouns of feminine gender). It's from phrḗn that English gained phrenes (wits, sanity) and hence phreno-.
In English, the adjective schizophrenic (characteristic of or suffering from schizophrenia) dates in the medical literature from 1911 (in translations of Dr Bleuler's publications) and was immediately adopted also as a noun (schizophrenic patient). That survived but another noun formation in English was schizophrene which emerged in 1925, the construct presumably a tribute to Dr Bleuler's original work having been written in German. As such things became more publicized during the post-war years (and picked up in popular culture including film and novels), the transferred adjectival sense of "contradictory, inconsistent" emerged in the mid 1950s, applied to anything from the behavior of race horses and motor-cycles to the nature of musical composition. The jargon of psychology also produced schizophrenogenic (tending to spark or inspire schizophrenia). The adjective schizoid (resembling schizophrenia; tending sometimes to less severe forms of schizophrenia) dates from 1925, from the 1921 German coining schizoid (1921), the construct being schiz(ophrenia) + -oid. The suffix -oid was from a Latinized form of the the Ancient Greek -ειδής (-eidḗs) & -οειδής (-oeidḗs) (the “ο” being the last vowel of the stem to which the suffix is attached); from εἶδος (eîdos) (form, shape, likeness). It was used (1) to demote resembling; having the likeness of (usually including the concept of not being the same despite the likeness, but counter-examples exist), (2) to mean of, pertaining to, or related to and (3) when added to nouns to create derogatory terms, typically referring to a particular ideology or group of people (by means of analogy to psychological classifications such as schizoid). Before Dr Bleuler's term became standardized, the condition had been known as dementia praecox (from the Latin dēmentia (madness; insanity) + praecox (premature; untimely), thus the sense “untimely madness” or “premature dementia”). Schizophrenia is a noun, schizophrenic & schizoids are nouns & adjectives and schizophrenically is an adverb; the noun plural is schizophrenics.
The term “psychiatry” seems to have been coined by German physician Johann Christian Reil (1759-1813) and while doubtlessly he wasn’t the first clinician to notice some people were “odd”, he was a pioneer in attempting to a novel approach to their treatment; his idea was as well as their skills and knowledge, doctors should use their “psyche” (a learned borrowing from Latin psychē, from the Ancient Greek ψυχή (psukhḗ) (soul) as a therapeutic agent. In summoning their souls for this good work, there may been an element of German romanticism but “psychiatry” caught on in a way the English term for such things never did; being English, they called it “moral treatment” which to patients and physicians alike must have sounded ominously censorious. Coming into a post-Enlightenment world, the discipline of psychiatry was from the beginning scientific in a way older forms of medicine originally were not; right for the start it was concerned with classification, something in the last seventy odd years refined and greatly expanded by the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
One early example was to divide mental illness into a binary: there were neurotics (those with a capacity to harm themselves) and there were psychotics (those with a capacity to harm others) but the “crown jewels” of psychiatry was schizophrenia. Whatever the debates about the increased prevalence of the condition induced by “modern life” (however and whenever defined) the medical literature makes clear it’s not a recent addition to the human condition, being recognized as a clinical entity in the Hindu Ayur Veda (an ancient, holistic Indian system of medicine) and there are detailed descriptions in the surviving notes of Aretaeus of Cappadocia, a celebrated physician of Ancient Greece who practiced late in the second century AD; doctors have long been dealing with madmen. By the end of the eighteenth century, based on the literature, some consensus seems to have been reached regarding schizophrenia’s symptoms but the first recognized “codified” description of the condition is thought to have appeared in the fifth edition (1898) of Ein Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie (A Textbook: Foundations of Psychiatry and Neuroscience) by German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926); it was a seminal work in modern scientific psychiatry. In 1911 Dr Bleuler coined “schizophrenia” (split mind) and the rest is history.
Madness
Within the profession of psychiatry, schizophrenia has a long (and technical) definitional history although, in essence, it’s always been thought a severe and chronic mental disorder characterized by disturbances in thought, perception and behavior. Lacking any physical or laboratory test, it can be difficult to diagnose as schizophrenia involves a range of cognitive, behavioral, and emotional symptoms. In the fifth edition of the DSM ((DSM-5 (2013)), the lifetime prevalence of schizophrenia is noted as 0.3%-0.7%, the psychotic manifestations typically emerging between the mid-teens and mid-thirties, with the peak age of onset of the first psychotic episode in the early to mid-twenties for males and late twenties for females. The DSM-5 editors also made changes to the criteria to make a diagnosis of schizophrenia, the most significant amendments since DSM-III (1980).
Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (1992), by US clinical psychologist Louis A Sass (b 1949), was an exploration of why mystery continues to shroud schizophrenia, which, despite advances in biological psychiatry and neuroscience, appears little changed in almost a century Sass quoted approvingly a description of schizophrenia as "a condition of obscure origins and no established etiology, pathogenesis and pathology…" without "…even any clear disease marker or laboratory test by which it can readily be identified." That "threshold" problem is not unique to schizophrenia (it was much debated when the controversy about Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) was at its height in the 1990s) but it remains of great interest to the profession.
However, in a departure from most writings on mental illness, Sass explored the "striking similarities" between the seemingly bizarre universe of schizophrenic experiences and the sensibilities and structures of consciousness revealed in the works of modernist artists and writers such as Franz Kafka (1883–1924), Paul Valéry (1871–1945), Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008), Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) and Salvador Dalí (1904–1989). Applying the techniques of psychology to modernism, he traced similar cognitive configurations reflected in schizophrenia and modern art & literature, finding both artist and schizophrenic characterized by a pronounced thrust to deconstruct the world and subjectively to reconstruct human experience without reference to objective reality. Layers of reality, real and constructed, co-exist and interact, frequently fusing into each-other, producing an acute self-awareness Sass called "hyperreflexivity", as well as a profound sense of alienation from the empirical world. Sass allowed his analysis to reach its logical conclusion, that there is a tenuous, though clearly discernible, connection between modern culture and madness, speculating that insanity might be “…a disease of certain highly advanced forms of cultural organization, perhaps a part of the price we pay for civilization?" His thesis wasn’t without critics although most acknowledged Madness and Modernism was at least a minor literary classic.
As the DSM makes clear, not all schizophrenics are the same. In 2011, Lindsay Lohan was granted a two-year restraining order against alleged stalker David Cocordan. The order was issued some days after she filed complaint with police who, after investigation by their Threat Management Department, advised the court Mr Cocordan (who at the time had been using at least five aliases) “suffered from schizophrenia”, was “off his medication” and had a "significant psychiatric history of acting on his delusional beliefs.” That was worrying enough but Ms Lohan may have revealed her real concerns in an earlier tweet on X (then known as Twitter) in which she included a picture of David Cocordan, claiming he was "the freemason stalker that has been threatening to kill me- while he is TRESPASSING!", adding "im actually scared now- the blood in the 'cults' book was too much. All my fans, my supporters, please stand by me. (sic)". Being stalked by a schizophrenic is bad enough but the thought of being hunted by a schizophrenic Freemason truly is frightening. Apparently an unexplored matter in the annals of psychiatry, it seems the question of just how schizophrenia might particularly manifest in Freemasons awaits research so there may be a PhD there for someone, the obvious question to explore being (1) does Freemasonry tend to attract schizophrenics or (2) does Freemasonry tend to induce schizophrenia? As far as is known, there have been no further reports of Ms Lohan being a victim of Masonic stalking but few doubt the Freemasons will have kept open their "Lindsay Lohan file".
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