Schizophrenia
Re “Catching a Wave,” July 17.
This article begins, “Call it schizophrenic weather: Scorching heat inland. Foggy and cooler temperatures along the coast. So goes the split personality of Ventura County’s summer weather.”
Call it bad journalism. Call it a lack of education. Call it an inability to look up big words in the dictionary.
“Schizophrenia (n): Any of a group of psychotic reactions characterized by withdrawal from reality with highly variable accompanying affective, behavioral and intellectual disturbances. schizophrenic (adjective and noun).”--American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition.
As a psychiatrist treating mental illness and as an associate professor teaching the treatment of mental illness, I find the uneducated, uninformed lead to this article outrageous and reprehensible. In a decade where mental illness sufferers and advocates fight to remove stigma of and judgment against mental illness, in a decade where the biological, medical basis of major mental disorders are public knowledge, this lead paragraph should not only not appear, it should be apologized for.
COLLEEN COPELAN, M.D., Ventura
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