Patty Duke's Legacy

Patty Duke’s Legacy

On The View last week, in noting Patty Duke’s death, one of the co-hosts asked if her TV show of identical cousins was to take advantage of her bipolar syndrome, i.e., two separate parts of her personality. Shows ignorance of mental disorders is alive and well.

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia, where sufferers often talk to themselves, seemed proof of separate personalities warring within one body. It is actually the person’s subconscious leaking through and planting thoughts and feelings into the conscious brain, which usually only surface in dreams and is why we need a certain amount of sleep for the subconscious to work through problems.

I lived with my grandparents when I first moved to MA from NJ. My uncle joined the household two years later. He had schizophrenia with paranoia. Very intelligent, interesting guy who worked nights in a cheese-curl factory. He did fairly well in job settings where he needn’t deal with many people. Hospitalized several times in his younger years and forced to take medication, his paranoia led him to believe the government or some other they intended to poison or control him.

Diagnosed in later years with diabetes, he believed it further proof of that allusive they colluding against him and ate candy, drank sugary soda, and wound up in a nursing home where they put him on an anti-psychotic. His last year was probably the happiest I’ve ever known him. He died in his sleep from diabetes’ complications. I miss him.

Bipolar Disorder

As in schizophrenia, there is a spectrum of symptoms in bipolar disorder, but again, having the disorder has nothing to do with separate personalities. It means you can run the gamut from depressed to hyper or manic in the space of minutes, even seconds—anger often a manifestation of the manic phase or grandiose schemes and plans. Not separate parts of the personality, they are the usual spectrum of human emotions run amok because of an imbalance in normal brain chemicals and therefore why it is considered a disorder.

No one asks for these congenital diseases or does anything to deserve having them, and all have a difficult time with diagnosis since the symptoms can indicate so many different diagnoses. Self-medication often arises before victims even realize the symptoms they seek to alleviate are part of a disorder. Addiction can be an additional stress to combat as they deal with the mental disease. They deserve nothing but compassion and a better medical system than the one currently leaving too many undiagnosed and untreated.