TALES OF LOVE AND OTHER DISORDERS: FORESIC PSYCHIATRISTS VS. FORTUNE COOKIES

FORENSIC PSYCHIATRISTS VS. FORTUNE COOKIES: OR WHAT IS SCHIZOPHRENIA?

While doing research for a novel about a serial killer, I came across these facts in the case of Edward Kemper. Kemper's history is typical of serial killer's: they often have an outburst in their teens, are incarcerated with other juveniles. What is interesting about Kemper is that he was 6' 9" and fit into a theory that males with a genetic anomaly of having an extra Y monochrome, XYY on the 47th, have a propensity for becoming more violent than men with the normal XY DNA.
He also is typical of the precision of forensic and other psychiatrists in evaluating the mental health of an individual, making the ersatz science as accurate as your last fortune cookie.

In 1964, he admitted to shooting his grandparents and was sent to Atascadero State Hospital for psychiatric treatment. On the recommendation of two psychiatrists, he was released five years later. In 1972, he killed and decapitated two women. Four months later, he killed a 15-year-old girl, had sex with the dead body, and then dismembered it. Later that year he was examined by two court-appointed psychiatrists and given a clean bill of health. Two months later, Kemper confessed to the brutal murders of eight women, one of whom was his own mother. What this article did not state is that Kemper decapitated his mother and used her head to practice tossing darts. When he became bored he stuffed her head down the garbage disposal.

He was a prime example of a psychopath as defined by Hervey Cleckley in The Mask of Sanity, a human being devoid of a conscience. Cleckley and his colleague Dr. Thigpen examined the woman who was the model for their book 'The Three Faces of Eve.' Ultimately, they had reservations about Eve's alternate personalities. Multiple personality is so rare that there have been about four cases in the literature since WW II.

MOST PEOPLE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT SCHIZOPHRENIA IS AND WHAT ARE ITS SYMPTOMS
The average person thinks that schizophrenia is a person with two or more distinct personalities. Multiple personality disorder or DID-Dissociative Identity Disorder is either very rare or it does not exist at all. When I was doing my research for my serial killer novel, I read the work and spoke with Dr. Dorothy Lewis and she was kind enough to provide me with her interviews with men who have killed while they claimed not to recall having committed the murder. In short, they committed their rimes while in a state of dissociation called a fugue. In rare instances, people have left home to do some errands and do not return for days, weeks, and in some rare instances for years. They create a new identity and when the do recall their real persona, they often return home and the memory of the fugue degrades and is often completely forgotten. These states, if they exist at all are very rare.
In 1908 Dr. Eugen Bleuler used the word schizophrenia—which translates into a "splitting of the mind" and comes from the Greek roots schizein ("to split") and phrēn, "mind")was coined by Eugen Bleuler intended to use the word to describe the separation between personality, thinking, memory, and perception. Bleuler described the symptoms as the 4 A's: flattened Affect, Autism, impaired Association of ideas and Ambivalence. Bleuler realized the illness was not dementia because his patients improved rather than deteriorated, and used the term in place of dementia. Treatment was revolutionized in the mid-1950s with the development and introduction of chlorpromazine or Thorazine which was intended to be an antihistamine when it was discovered by French chemists by happenstance.
The diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia were the subject of a number of controversies. Diagnostic studies indicated that schizophrenia was diagnosed to a far greater extent in the US compared Europe. This was partly due to looser diagnostic criteria in the US^. David Rosenhan's 1972 study, published with the title "On being sane in insane places", concluded that the diagnosis of schizophrenia in the US was often subjective and unreliable, leading to the revision of the diagnosis of schizophrenia.The term schizophrenia is commonly misunderstood to mean that affected persons have a "split personality". Although schizophrenia does not include people with multiple personalities. The confusion arises in part due to the literal interpretation Dissociative identity disorder (having a "split personality") was also often misdiagnosed as Schizophrenia based on the loose criteria in the DSM-II.
^{Irrespective of changes in gun control laws, those with a a severe mental illness such as schizophrenia are less apt to use them than the general population. The mentally ill are more often the subject of communal ire and intolerance rather than the perpetrators of violent behavior.}