Love Kills

Let Me Entertain You

Schizophrenia is a group of disorders marked by damaged and weakened thinking and behaviours. Schizophrenics often have intensified perceptions of sounds, colours, and other features of their environment. Schizophrenics often gradually withdraw from interactions with other people.

The prevalence of schizophrenia is thought to be about 1% of the population around the world and the disorder is considered to be one of the top ten causes of long-term disability worldwide.

One sub-type of schizophrenia is disorganized schizophrenia.

Disorganized schizophrenia is hypothesized to be one feature of a 3-factor model of schizophrenia symptoms; the others factors being reality distortion (delusions/hallucinations) and psychomotor poverty (poor speech, lack of spontaneous movement, and blunting emotion).

Disorganized schizophrenia is characterized by illogical thoughts and behaviours. In other words: agitated and purposeless behaviour.

Signs of disorganized schizophrenia are:

Disorganized thinking - the patient is unable to form logical thoughts. This inability affects speech - during a conversation the individual cannot stick to the subject and leaps from one disparate subject to another.

Disorganized behavior - Disorganized behavior may feel normal to the person with schizophrenia, but appears bizarre to those around them. Behaviors may vary from being child-like and silly, to aggressive and violent.

Inappropriate or lacking emotional expression - The individual may show the signs of normal emotion and may even talk with a monotonous voice. However, the face appears blank, facial expressions are significantly diminished. The patient appears extremely apathetic. There may be no eye contact with other people or any display of body language. On some occasions the individual may display behavior which is not appropriate for given situations - this may include bursting out laughing during a serious event.

Other signs and symptoms of schizophrenia:

Delusions - The patient has false beliefs of persecution, guilt or grandeur.

Hallucinations - hearing voices is much more common than seeing, feeling, tasting, or smelling things which are not there, but seem very genuine to the patient.

Social withdrawal - when a patient with schizophrenia withdraws socially it is often because he believes somebody is going to harm them. Other reasons could be a fear of interacting with other humans because of poor social skills.

Unaware of illness - as the hallucinations and delusions seem so real for the patients, many of them may not believe they are ill. They may refuse to take medications which could help them enormously for fear of side-effects.

Cognitive difficulties - the schizophrenics ability to concentrate, remember things, plan ahead and to organize himself are affected. Communication becomes more difficult. There may also be grimacing, bizarre postures, problems functioning at school, and clumsy/uncoordinated movements. Patients with disorganized schizophrenia symptoms are not usually able to get medical help on their own. When their symptoms appear to have subsided, it is common for them to believe they are fine and do not need treatment. Seeking medical help is frequently initiated by a family member or good friend.

Regardless, George Wilson White had no idea he had schizophrenia. He just knew that he hated a handful of things that others did not seem to mind:

- When people said "sorry" to him.

- When people said "how are you" to him.

- When people felt sorry for him/looked down on him.

- When people clapped their hands.

At the moment several things against George's liking happened:

Number 1. His mother was shouting in an uncomfortably loud volume.

Number 2. Annie was crying in an uncomfortably loud volume, but that was understandable; she was a baby.

Number 3. His mother was drunk.

Number 4. The doorbell rang.

George did not like the doorbell ringing. He did not like the fact that it scared his mother even though he liked the fact that his mother stopped shouting.

George quickly used the distraction to take Annie into his bedroom and closed the door behind him. He sat down on his bed, pulled his feet up under him and wrapped the duvets around him and his sister's back.

"Hey you," Annie said, as she snuggled against George's shoulder.

"You have to be very quiet," George whispered to Annie. He did not know why they had to be quiet really, but he was scared and thought it was probably best to be quiet when scared. He was scared that his mother would start shouting again, scared Annie would start crying again and scared that the people ringing the doorbell would say hurtful things to him. George was always afraid of meeting new people, not only because they would hurt him, but because he would overreact to the things they said. He hated overreacting to things.

Annie looked at George with her big eyes and flinched as loud voices arose from the hallway. George could see her lip trembling and knew it was only moments before she would start crying again. His mother was shouting in the hallway and this time her shrill voice was accompanied by other voices arguing with her. George did not want to hear his mother arguing. He wanted to escape from all the voices and noises of the world. He pulled the duvets over their heads and the darkness surrounded them. His back hurt from sitting in this position and he strongly disliked not getting any fresh air, but he closed his eyes and started humming softly, both for himself as well as for Annie. It was an old song by a band called Panic at the Disco. He had heard it when visiting a boy in his class, Pete, who had shown him their album.

"When the moon fell in love with the sun, all was golden in the sky. All was golden when the day met the night."

The voices were fading, it was just him and his sister left on the world. She was quiet now, just looking at him.

"When the sun found the moon, she was drinking tea in a garden under the green umbrella trees in the middle of summer-"

A harsh hand drew the duvets away and the cold light attacked him. George screamed and kicked his feet to the person. He did not know what was happening, but he was panic-stricken and felt the adrenaline rush through his body. The man who had exposed him to the cold light fell to the ground and George grabbed Annie and held her tightly to his chest as he ran out the door and through the hallway, trying to reach the front door and escape this horror before anyone could stop him. He heard his mother shout his name behind him, but ignored her and pushed open the front door, feeling a hint triumph before bursting right into another man who quickly grabbed him and held his large, strong arms around George. George soon realized that there was no possibility of escape. It was as if everything became clear to him at that very moment. The things he had been scared to tell people about, the things that had frightened him, they were all happening here in this very moment. People could see him now.

It was all over.

George let out a long breath and felt his muscles relax. It was as if he had closed his eyes, only they were open, like being underwater.

Annie was in the officers' arms now. How strange.

They were talking, but he was underwater so he could not hear them. Could they not see that? Did they not understand that they had pushed him underwater?

Now he was sitting in a car.

In a room.

People were talking to him again, was he talking back? It was an awful lot of talking.

White; another room.

Clean bed sheets.

Finally darkness.