The Golden Age of Science Fiction featured many of Science Fiction’s greatest and most prolific authors. American author Philip K. Di" (1928 - 1982), active from 1952 until his death, was one of those who helped shape science fiction during the three decades during which he was active (Behrens and Ruch). Throughout his career, Di" wrote more than forty novels, one hundred short stories, as well as numerous essays. Amongst the author’s numerous works, eight short stories and four novels were eventually adapted to the silver screen (such as the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) which became Blade Runner (1982) and the short story “Adjustment Team” (1954) which was loosely adapted to eventually become The Adjustment Bureau (2011) (Kimbell). Nevertheless, something was eating the author away despite his success.
Although it was only later in his life that Di" received the diagnosis, for much of his life he suffered from schizophrenia and paranoia. The writer’s mental state and his will to understand the workings behind it would become the basis for many of Philip K. Di"’s stories and essays, such as was the case for Martian Time-Slip (Behrens and Ruch). In Philip K. Di"'s book Martian Time-Slip (Martian Time-Slip), the author symbolically poses both as the characters Ja" Bohlen and Manfred, with the former representing his current mental state and the la$er his envisioned future mental state. The parallel between Di" and his fictional characters is made even clearer after having read his essay “Schizophrenia and the Book of Changes” (1965), which reflects upon the authors views on schizophrenia, LSD, and the “Book of Changes” (known as I Ching in Mandarin). “The Exegesis of Philip K. Di"”, a collection of journals kept...
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Schizophrenia is one of the most well known and surprisingly frequent psychological disorders today. Patients who have this disorder have problems separating reality from fantasy or delusion. Typically, the person with schizophrenia starts off with a small paranoia about something or someone and continues to get more and more problematic until he/she has trouble functioning in the real world because of emotional, physical, mental, or financial reasons. Because of this, most people who end up homeless have Schizophrenia because they are unable to keep a job, Nathaniel Ayes in the book The Soloist. Nathaniel was a cello player attending the Julliard school of music, one of the world’s most prestigious performing art schools, until he developed schizophrenia and was unable to continue. This book shows how much a disorder such as schizophrenia can turn a person’s life upside down in the course of as little as a few weeks.
What is reality? This is the question Philip K. Dick poses in his book, Time Out of Joint. Dick strategically uses literary devices such as narrative structure and symbolism in order to comment on one’s perception of what is real, and what is fiction. By making “time out of joint” and allowing a shift in moral power within his novel, Dick exposes the feelings of paranoia and insecurity that were experienced during the fifties, when Dick wrote this novel, but implies that there is hope that peace can still be attained.
Heberle, Mark. "Contemporary Literary Criticism." O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Vol. 74. New York, 2001. 312.
The Soloist (Foster, Krasnoff & Wright, 2008), is based on a true story of Nathaniel Anthony Ayers Jr. who develops psychosis and becomes homeless. In the film, Nathaniel is considered a cello genius who is discovered on the streets by Steve Lopez, a journalist from the Los Angeles Times. Steve was searching for a story and he decided to write a newspaper article about Nathaniel. Nathaniel always had a passion for music. He was a child prodigy and attended Juilliard School of Music. However, he faced many complications at Juilliard, particularly hearing voices speaking to him. Unable to handle the voices, Nathaniel dropped out and ended up living on the streets of Los Angeles. Steve and Nathaniel develops an unexpected
Will Brooker. “Reel Toads and Imaginary Cites: Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner and the Contemporary Science Fiction Movie. (London: Wallflower Press. 2005)
In the film “ A Beautiful Mind” John Nash experiences a few different positive symptoms. The first of these positive symptoms are seen through the hallucinations John has of having a room -mate while at Princeton. This room- mate continues to stay “in contact” with John through out his adult life and later this room- mate’s niece enters Johns mind as another coinciding hallucination. Nash’s other hallucination is Ed Harris, who plays a government agent that seeks out Nash’s intelligence in the field of code- breaking.
Schizophrenia is not a new mental disorder. Through written documents, it can be traced to the Pharaoh days in Egypt and even further back to the second millennium before Christ. The disease was first identified as a mental illness by German psychiatrist Dr. Emile Kraepelin in 1887. Kraepelin, identified by H.J. Eysenck's Encyclopedia of Psychology as the founder of modern scientific psychiatry, psychopharmacology and psychiatric gene, was the first to make a distinction in the psychotic disorders between what he called dementia praecox and manic depression. He believed that dementia praecox was primarily a disease of the brain, and particularly a form of dementia. Kraepelin named the disorder 'dementia praecox' (early dementia) to distinguish it from other forms of dementia (such as Alzheimer's disease) which typically occur late in life. It wasn’t until 1911 when Swiss psychiatrist, Eugen Bleuler, coined the term "schizophrenia". Bleuler changed the name to schizophrenia because Kraepelin's name was misleading as the illness was not a dementia (it did not always lead to mental deterioration) and could occur late in life as well as early. Schizophrenia" comes from the Greek roots schizo (split) and phrene (mind) to describe the fragmented thinking of people with the disorder. He was also the first to describe the symptoms of schizophrenia as "positive" or "negative." Both Bleuler and Kraepelin subdivided schizophrenia into categories, based on symptoms and prognosis. There are five types described in the DSM-III: disorganized, catatonic, paranoid, residual, and undifferentiated. The first three categories were originally proposed by Kraepelin. The DSM- III stands for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders whic...
Schizophrenia is a devastating mental disorder that strikes teens and young adults crippling their brain and fragmenting their mind. Victims of schizophrenia remain in endless mental agony constantly confused and in terror. They suffer constantly from hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia. Approximately 1% of the world population live with this disorder making it one of the most common mental disorders in the world. Despite the numbers, there is no known cause or cure for schizophrenia. So what is the disorder, why is it so hard to eliminate, and why do so many people fall victim to the fragmented mind?
Schizophrenia is a devastating and costly mental disorder that affects 1% of population worldwide. Patients manifest clusters of positive, negative and cognitive symptoms in early twenties and are often left with life-long severe mental disability and social stigma. Cognitive deficits in patients with schizophrenia are considered core symptoms of this disorder, and can manifest at the initial stage (Elvevåg and Goldberg, 2000). Atypical antipsychotics ameliorate positive symptoms but may only modestly improve cognitive symptoms (Richelson, 2010). In addition to this, some of the typical antipsychotics are even have deteriorative effects on cognitive symptoms (Heaton and Crowley 1981). To find the appropriate treatments for cognitive deficits of schizophrenia, it is important to know the underlying pathophysiology.
Schizophrenia. What is Schizophrenia? I bet if you pick a random person from the street and ask him/her what they know about Schizophrenia they would reply “I don’t know, is it a heart disorder? “This topic at hand comes somehow from a personal encounter that dates back several years ago. When I was in grade 12, our school organized a trip to the Psychiatric Hospital of the Cross located in Jal El-Dib, as part of the community service activity. During our visit, I came across a very weird man. This man was having a conversation with the wall, as if somebody real was standing in front of him. All of my classmates started making fun of him and calling him a wacko. Being curious, I asked the doctor what was wrong with him and he revealed to me that this man, Elie, was diagnosed with Schizophrenia. Later on I had the privilege to approach Elie and talk to him. Out of surprise, Elie turned out to be a very funny and nice guy. He told me that he was diagnosed with Schizophrenia when he was 23 years old and how this mental disorder affected his life negatively. Elie’s case touched me at heart and made me realize that people are deeply uninformed about Schizophrenia and its effects on people diagnosed with this mental disorder.
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a well-known book about an eccentric candy maker living in his own mystical world that has been made into two popular movies. Wonka is a character that is two things at once; unflappable and socially anxious, overly friendly but also untrustworthy and isolated, altruistic and sadistic, hopeful and cynical, grandiose and fragile (Pincus, 2006). While Willy Wonka may be a fictional character, he does display the very real disorder Schizotypal Personality Disorder or SPD. Schizotypal Personality Disorder is a personality disorder that affects approximately 3.9% of the American population and is similar to Schizophrenia but without delusions or hallucinations (Pulay et al., 2009). While little is known about the causes of Schizotypal Personality Disorder, it is becoming a significant personality disorder that warrants an understanding of what is currently known about the disorder and treatments available to individuals living with SPD.
The Man in the High Castle: Criticisms of Reality and Dictatorship by Philip K. Dick
In this essay we will consider a much more recent approach to time that came to the fore in the twentieth century. In 1908 James McTaggart published an article in Mind entitled 'The Unreality of Time', in which, as the title implies, he argued that there is in reality no such thing as time. Now although this claim was in itself startling, probably what was even more significant than McTaggart's arguments was his way of stating them. It was in this paper that McTaggart first drew his now standard distinction between two ways of saying when things happen. In this essay we shall outline these ways of describing events and then discuss the merits and demerits of each, and examine what has become known as the 'tensed versus tenseless' debate on temporal becoming.
The scientific definition of time is a measurement of progress that is relative to an individual’s perception of events (HowStuffWorks.com, 2010). A psychological study proves that these viewpoints are
Suddendorf, T. & Corballis, M.C. (2007) The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans? [On-line] Available from: http://www.memorylab.org/Files/Corballis_MTT_BBS_2007.pdf, [accessed 5th May 2011].