American Folk Art Museum to showcase Martín Ramírez as so much more than a “schizophrenic artist”

It’s the 1930s: California police pick up a depressed and confused Mexican immigrant named Martín Ramírez, who doesn’t speak English. Ramirez is diagnosed as a “catatonic schizophrenic” and committed to a state hospital.

Early 1950s: Ramírez is still trapped in a mental institution, and has barely spoken in all this time. But he has become a self-taught artist—a master who has saved some of his drawings rolled up in his jacket and tucked under his mattress so the hospital staff wouldn’t discard them. (The staff believed the works were tainted because Ramírez has tuberculosis.) A visiting professor of psychology “discovers” Ramírez and provides him with art supplies.

Thirty-two years after Ramírez was first institutionalized: The artist is released and, well, to read the rest of the story you’ll have to follow this link to an article at Artdaily.com.

To see 90 of the artist’s works, you can check out the Martín Ramírez exhibit on view from Jan. 23 through April 29 at The American Folk Art Museum in New York City.

If a trip to NYC isn’t your budget, you can at least see a sampling of drawings by Googling for Martín Ramírez images.

posted by Daniele Sadres

Seroquel Marketing Material Meets the FDA

AstraZeneca Warned by FDA About Misleading Seroquel Marketing Material

AstraZeneca working with FDA after drug warning

FDA orders AstraZeneca to change promotions on Seroquel

These articles discuss a letter that was sent to the drug company by the FDA about some of their promotional material, and the company's response to that letter. The material in question was a fact sheet distributed to doctors along with the prescribing information.

I thought it best to just let the articles speak for themselves. If you'd like to follow the issue further, this link should do a Google News search for you.

posted by j. melinn

An American Schizophrenia

Today I was shown by one of my co-workers a recent article published in the Chicago Tribune. It is an interesting and thought-provoking piece dealing with the United States’ frequently changing foreign policy. The author wanted to bring attention to the fact that the U.S. government seems to oscillate between extreme isolationism from and direct intervention in burgeoning democracies around the world.

The problem arises with the article’s title: “An American Schizophrenia”. While I understand what the writer is trying to say, the title uses “schizophrenia” interchangeably with the term “multiple personality disorder”. >
The writer of the article was obviously pointing out that the U.S. government has what could be loosely term a “split-personality”. On the one hand, the U.S. government is intervening in Iraq to bring democracy. On the other, the U.S. government of the 1950s did not intervene when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary. While “split-personality” is not actually a medical term, it is often used to incorrectly refer to people with multiple personality disorder.

Multiple personality disorder is part of a group of illnesses called Dissociative disorders. The term multiple personality is not synonymous with the term schizophrenia. They are two very different mental disorders.

On the NAMI website, multiple personality is described as a disorder in which “an individual has more than one distinct identity or personality state that surfaces in the individual on a recurring basis”.

Schizophrenia “interferes with a person's ability to think clearly, to distinguish reality from fantasy, to manage emotions, make decisions, and relate to others”. It does not cause an individual to have more than one personality. It is a very common misconception that multiple personality disorder and schizophrenia are the same thing. It would do much to dispel stigma and to encourage compassion for people with mental illness, if the public had a deeper understanding of various mental illnesses.

This blog entry is simply to point out that schizophrenia and multiple personality are not the same thing, and that using the terms interchangeably confuses people about mental illness. The more people understand various mental illnesses and how they affect those who have them, the less mysterious they become. The more mental illness is understood, the less stigma there will be surrounding it.

posted by Christa Andrade