Christian bloggers misusing the term schizophrenia for metaphorical purposes
OK, before I start this post let me say that there are a million and one things I do wrong on this blog, that could be easily called out, and sometimes are.
Today, two Christian bloggers have used the term schizophrenia inappropriately.
These are bloggers that I thoroughly respect and have no desire to single out publicly; especially as this practice is all too common. It revolves around using the term schizophrenia in a metaphorical sense, to denote the split nature of something.
Schizophrenia is a: dreadful, chronic, debilitating, sometimes scary, disease of the mind, and we need to tread carefully when using mental health terminology in a metaphorical sense. In fact, I would strongly urge avoiding this usage completely.
Other terms are often employed in this way, such as: Bipolar, and I would greatly encourage you to read a recent BBC article on this topic:
Terms like “bipolar”, “autistic” and “schizophrenic” are often used in jest to describe character traits. But how harmful is it to bandy the names of such conditions about?
It’s a common form of hyperbole.
The neighbour who keeps his house tidy has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). A socially awkward colleague is autistic. The weather isn’t just changeable, it’s bipolar.
Such analogies are so familiar they surely qualify as cliches. They are also inaccurate and, to many, deeply offensive.
Campaigners are targeting what many say is an increasingly common practice – deploying the language of clinical diagnosis to describe everyday personality traits.
Using these terms metaphorically is just a joke, not to be taken seriously, argue some. Others, however, warn that this serves to further obfuscate conditions that are widely misunderstood and stigmatised.
Either way, you don’t have to look hard for evidence of such terminology being deployed in this manner – even from sources you might not anticipate.
In December 2010 the Observer newspaper apologised for describing TV presenter Gok Wan’s dress sense as “schizophrenic”. The International Monetary Fund’s September 2011 World Economic Outlook, characterised a volatile global economy as “bipolar”. In an article for the Sunday Times, the writer Robert Harris described Gordon Brown and Richard Nixon as displaying “political Asperger’s syndrome”.
The mental health metaphor also has the distinction of having been deployed by that noted savant of the English language, Katie Price. During a court appearance in which she insisted she had been spraying scent rather than using her mobile phone while driving, the glamour model said: “I am quite OCD about my perfume habits, all my friends know that I’m always spraying perfume.”
Research suggests these are far from isolated examples. A 2007 study of the terms “schizophrenia” and “schizophrenic” in the UK national press found that 11% of references were metaphorical, with broadsheet papers more likely to deploy such phrasing than tabloids. By contrast, cancer was only used in this manner in 0.02% of cases.
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Nonetheless, Arun Chopra, a consultant psychiatrist at Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham and the author of the British research, believes the tendency has a negative impact on the treatment of patients.
He argues that deploying terms in such a way contributes to public misunderstanding – for instance, reinforcing the false notion that schizophrenia is a “Jekyll and Hyde” illness related to split personalities.
Moreover, he says it can be deeply upsetting to patients and their families, and recalls seeing a woman whose son was diagnosed with the condition bursting into tears when she read a newspaper article which described the weather as “schizophrenic”.
“The use of the word as a metaphor is tremendously damaging,” Chopra adds. “It’s part of the process of creating a stigma around mental illness.
“You would never hear it used in relation to a physical condition. You wouldn’t hear someone being described as a bit diabetic.”
As such, he says he would like the Oxford English Dictionary to remove its secondary definition of schizophrenic: “With the implication of mutually contradictory or inconsistent elements”.
November 14th, 2011 at 10:32 pm
Amen!
November 19th, 2011 at 1:49 pm
I agree, such terms are used these days in a far too much casual way and no real understanding, like many other words I can also think of, not necessarily related to mental illness. In a way it is lazy because rather than enhance their own vocabulary there are those that prefer to just suddenly jump on a bandwagon. I think for example of the word ‘gobsmacked‘, or ‘at the end of the day‘, which were popularized by the people on TV that used them. Then there are uses of words such as ‘depression‘ when really what these people are talking about if ‘actually I just feel a bit fed up‘, or ‘migraine‘ when all they are really saying is ‘I have a bit of a headache‘.