[costello]

I was poking around on Ed Knight's website and ran across a term I'd never heard before - the clinician's illusion.

Here's how Ed describes it:

"Clinicians generally see people at their worst and when people labeled with schizophrenia begin to do better they generally leave the system. And due to stereotyping and prejudice (called stigma) they do not generally publically speak."

Clinicians believe that no one ever gets better, because they don't see the people who get better.

Here's another description from The Handbook of Attitudes (p. 731):

"Two cognitively oriented approaches, both of which possess linkages to the attitude literature, can account for the finding that people with mental illness are often viewed in an unrealistically negative manner. They involve the selective exposure (Frey, 1986) and accessibility effect (Higgins, Rholes, and Jones, 1977), respectively. With regard to the former, it is important to recognize that clinicians are in the business of helping individuals who have a problem. Once the client has improved significantly, the services of the clinician are less frequently sought. Thus, on a daily basis, clinicians are rarely exposed to cases that demonstrate significant improvement. As a consequence, psychiatrists characterize individuals with schizophrenia as showing ever-worsening and residual impairment (Harding, Brooks, Ashikaga, Strauss & Breier, 1987). Although this characterization describes schizophrenic patients who remain under psychiatric treatment, it is not an accurate portrayal of this group of patients taken as a whole (Corrigan, Watson & Ottati, in press). In fact a significant number of people with schizophrenia improve and achieve rehabilitation. Thus, clinical observation of people with mental illness contains a selective exposure bias that produces an overly pessimistic view of mental illness, a view that has been coined the clinician's illusion (Harding et al., 1992; Harding & Zahniser, 1994)."

Yes! Yes! and Yes! This is exactly what I think when I hear from mental health professionals the "prognosis of doom," as Pat Deegan calls it, that my son won't get better. They say they know better than I do, because they work with people dx'd with MI. And I want to explain that the people who get better have moved on with their lives. In fact, I've heard of people who got better and tried to go back and tell their old pdocs that they've recovered - only to have the pdoc warn them that they'll probably have a relapse at any time!

[dillpickle1983]

@Costello,

May I please have the link to that website for Ed Knight. I hope you & your son are doing well, and hope the best for him (and you as well). I've just been diagnosed with SZ, and its been pretty hard for me also.

[costello]

Originally Posted by chandlerT660

@Costello,

May I please have the link to that website for Ed Knight. I hope you & your son are doing well, and hope the best for him (and you as well). I've just been diagnosed with SZ, and its been pretty hard for me also.

Sure. I should have thought to include that. It's http://professored.com/.

We're doing okay. Taking it one day at a time. I get frustrated with him, and it doesn't help.

Money is so tight right now. I bought a container of trail mix for him for $10. A couple of days later I found it in the trash. So I dug it out and told him I can't afford to throw away food. He said he didn't want it. I told him I'd eat it then. I had some last night. When I went to look for it today, he said he'd thrown it away again. He insisted it would save me from having to eat it. He said he'd opened the container and emptied it into the trash and then threw the container in too. I went through all the trash and couldn't find it. I can't figure out why he'd do that. And it upsets me because I just can't afford it.

He's also drinking huge quantities of water. I buy bottled water in cases of 24 16.9 oz bottles. He'll go through nearly a whole case in one day. I hope he's not developing diabetes or something. He wasn't going through water so fast back in December and January before he was on medication.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...utcomes-part-i
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...tcomes-part-ii

[costello]

Thanks, Byzantine. Really good blog posts. I hope a lot of people click on those links and read them.