Professor Kyriakos Veresies, a neurologist and psychiatrist who chairs the Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences at Philips University in Nicosia, has written for the column about schizophrenia being turned into… a slogan.
Here is an extract:
“There is a form of violence that need not injure anyone to count as violence. We see it on our streets every day: slogans, initials, symbols and football club colours daubed on walls, signposts, traffic signs and any public surface going. It is a curious occupation of space by ‘us’, set against ‘them’.
“One might call it a ‘terrorism of ugliness’. Not because every slogan is an act of terrorism in the literal sense, but because there is a mechanism of imposition at work. A message is repeated everywhere, the citizen cannot escape it, and shared space becomes a showcase for one particular identity.
“And now a new slogan has appeared that causes real unease: ‘Schizophrenia 94’. Torn from its clinical meaning, the word ‘schizophrenia’ becomes a rallying cry and a banner. Why would a group of people choose the name of a serious mental disorder to declare who they are? And what does that choice tell us about the individual’s relationship with the group, with the Law, with the other and with public space?
“‘Schizophrenia’ has been stripped of its scientific meaning and pressed into service as a metaphor for the extreme, the unpredictable, the uncontrollable. The word stops describing a mental disorder and becomes a badge of identity. That reveals something about how society sees mental illness. Schizophrenia is no longer presented as a condition that causes a human being pain and calls for treatment and care. It becomes shorthand for ‘We are so extreme that your rules cannot hold us.’ Mental illness becomes a metaphor for rebellion.
“Herein lies a deep social paradox. Just as we are trying to remove the stigma from people with mental disorders, everyday language carries on using diagnoses as insults, labels and symbols of aggression. The person with schizophrenia disappears. All that is left is a caricature of ‘madness’.
“This is not schizophrenia. It is something else. The behaviour may be an expression of fan loyalty, the need to belong, a search for social recognition, aggression, a reaction against authority, social imitation, a need to stand apart, or a mixture of several of these. Psychological analysis has to uncouple the act from the diagnosis and look for its meaning. Perhaps then the ‘Schizophrenia’ slogan will turn out to tell us more about the psychology of the group and its relationship with the Law than about schizophrenia…”
