A new sort of L.A. typecasting
I have good news. If you dress funny, talk funny, have no friends, believe in ghosts and communicate with UFOs, science finally has a name for you. You’re a schizotypal.
That doesn’t mean you’re a good friend of someone who is bipolar, but that you’re in a classification all by yourself. You’re a bit nutty, in other words, but you manage to get by. And there are probably more of you in L.A. than anywhere else.
I come by my information from one Dr. Adrian Raine, a professor of psychology at USC, who published a study on the subject in the Schizophrenia Bulletin, which is a journal about, not necessarily for, those who are a little off, as my mother used to say.
Raine, a smart, good-natured Brit, and research assistant Todd Lencz studied 69 temporary workers in L.A., 27 of whom were as normal as you and me (well, me, anyhow), 26 who suffered from psychiatric disorders and 16 who were really over the edge. I’m simplifying, of course, but then I’m a simple man.
The study involved magnetic resonance imaging to focus on the gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, but since this is a town more concerned with best actress than best science, I’m not going to trouble you with annoying details.
Suffice it to say that Raine utilized MRI, push-button responses and cards coded by colors and symbols to isolate a personality disorder he calls schizotypy, and a class of people who are schizotypals. He sees the condition as a “lite” version of schizophrenia and believes that 3% to 5% of our people suffer from it.
The category includes both native Angelenos and those who move to L.A. from, say, Omaha or Idaho because of our anything-goes reputation. Raine speculated in a phone conversation that “people like that may well come here believing that if they are a bit eccentric they’ll be adored or admired and not beaten by thugs with bicycle chains.”
To be diagnosed as a schizotypal, you’ve got to display five of 11 oddball traits, including those I mentioned earlier, plus others like believing your television set is talking to you or that the dog is barking your name. My dog often barks my name, but I never bark his, thereby placing me a cut above dogs, psychiatrically speaking. He’s my schizotypal, but I’m not his.
A significant difference between a schizophrenic and a schizotypal, by the way, is that the former has delusions while the latter has, well, beliefs. A schizotypal realizes his ideas might border on the bizarre, but feels that makes him smarter and better than everyone else because he bops along a mental road less traveled.
Raine didn’t ask exactly where his 69 test subjects lived, but suggested there might be “pockets” of the city in which the nut factor, my term, might be a little higher. He mentioned Venice. I mentioned Topanga. We were both thinking Hollywood.
During our conversation, he hinted at the “suspicion” that even writers could possess one or two of the traits that would label them schizotypals. When I gasped in disbelief, he added graciously that the same might also be true in the world of academia. It has to do with the close association of madness and creativity.
I was particularly interested in a segment of Raine’s study that dealt with people who dress oddly, concerned as we are with dress and undress in the City of Angles. The paper cites some examples: “a woman could be well dressed but wearing a baseball cap, or a man could dress for the day wearing nothing from the waist up.”
In L.A., that’s called style. People in show biz often go out of their way to mix and match odd combinations of apparel that call attention to the fact that they’re trying not to call attention to themselves. I’m not aware of any men who go to work topless, except for maybe carpenters or hod carriers who doff their tattered shirts in the summer’s blazing heat. That doesn’t include those who attend football games, paint team names on their bare bellies and bellow like warthogs. They’re probably schizoboors.
Living as I do in a community of writers, actors, artists, poets, transcendental meditationists, past life regressionists and out-of-body voyagers, I’m familiar with the kinds of people Raine describes in his study. We often get together to discuss our auras, use a Ouija board to contact dead relatives and agree that everyone is out to get us.
Speaking of which, I asked Raine if he ever planned to conduct a study to seek out the odd ones in Washington, D.C.
He laughed and said, “That’s a provocative idea. It could be interesting.” Tragic might be a better word. But that’s a pursuit for another time. I’ve got to go. The dog is calling me.
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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.
