Schizophrenic Individualism

As I pull together ideas for The Book of I, I am giving a lot of thought to an Individual being the basic component of any organization. You cannot divide the individual up into more simple parts. Yes, you can cut parts off, disable parts, make the individual less than full potential, but you cannot subdivide the individual. By definition an individual is indivisible.

This brings to mind schizophrenia. Well, I thought it did. I have learned something today. Schizophrenia is a different mental illness than Multiple Personalities, or the proper term is dissociative identity disorder (DID). But, while looking up the definition, I learned otherwise. I had equated the two until today.  So, my title is not appropriate, albeit a cool sounding one. Oh, and I have to throw out my old joke: “I’m schizophrenic and so am I!”

My reason for going down this trail was because I had asked myself: With multiple personalities, is the person an individual? I mean, DID is an individual committee of sorts. I guess this is a handicap for the individual, and each personality is a subdivision of the incomplete whole. A person who has multiple personalities must learn to Integrate them.

A mind trek I didn’t expect today.