ABSTRACT
The term schizophrenia was coined by Eugen Bleuler in the early twentieth century, and is derived, somewhat unhelpfully, from the Greek schizo-(õo = split/divide), and phrenos (’"oÂ& = mind). Perhaps owing to this etymology, the words `schizophrenia', and especially `schizophrenic', have acquired a completely unrelated colloquial usage, whereby they are used to refer to a paradox or contradiction. More troublingly, many people hold the erroneous belief that people with schizophrenia have a `split personality' or are subject to sudden dangerous transformations from normality to madness, similar to the character of Dr Jekyll and his alter-ego Mr Hyde, in the Victorian novella by Robert Louis Stevenson (Stevenson, 1886).
