Another poster said he doubted Deborah would be diagnosed as schizophrenic today. ITA. It appeared to me from her rich inner fantasy life that she had some sort of dissociative diosrder.
This is one of the very few films that I have liked better than the book. Oddlty most of the films that fit this category for me have been similar. I felt this way about Ordinary People too, and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
Quinlan's finest work.
What makes you think that a rich inner fantasy life constitutes a dissociative disorder? Anyway, by Greenberg's own account in recent interviews, her "fantasy life" wasn't the problem. The problem was and remains her social ineptitude and periodic inability to process sensory, visual and auditory input. She invented Yr because subsequent to brain tumor surgery as a five-year-old, her visual field literally went "grey and flat". (Yes, brain tumor -- a fact that has just recently been revealed. She just changed it to urethral tumor for the book.)
Yr was an explanation to herself of what was wrong. If anything, Greenberg is a communicating autistic who is given to bouts of severe depression. She says her depression is not cured by drugs but by activity. She has explained this all at length in several interviews.
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She had cancer? I always thought it was a benign tumor.
Time to read the book again, I guess.
I trust I make myself obscure.
Greenberg's condition doesn't sound at all like autism to me. I'm not a psychiatrist, but my son is autistic (the sort that can communicate), and I have met many others.
Based on the description of Greenberg's symptoms, what ShawnaC123 posted sounds right to me.
Well, I said "if anything", I am a communicating autistic myself and you know what happens from your son's experience. He's probably told you about this. Every once in a while you can't process sensory input. It's still coming at you but it doesn't make any sense. This fits with the descriptions of the Pit in the book. Obviously these are complicated matters, it isn't going to be like a one size fits all thing. Anyway, some doctors reading her actual case said that she had major depression and somatization (physical symptoms caused by stress) and was not schizophrenic.
You've got me?! Who's got you?!
I agree with the original diagnosis of schizophrenia. Deborah may not have fit into any of the defined types (paranoid, catatonic, etc) but she was still very much delusional, psychotic, and hallucinogenic. Above all, she had very little contact with reality.
However, I also agree with the other poster who said that Deborah could have been autistic. But see, autism is a behavioral, not a mental, disorder so that's something she could have gotten help for outside of a mental hospital. Deborah was placed in the hospital for Yr even though it was not the real sickness because Yr still produced in her schizophrenic systems--delusions, psyhchosis, hallucinations, etc. The fact that these symptoms made it impossible for her to survive in the real world jusifies her original diagnosis.
By coming to terms with the reasons behind Yr (autism), Deborah was able to let go of the fantasy world as well as the symptoms it produced (schizophrenia).
From wikipedia:
In both real life and in the novel, Greenberg was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but this does not necessarily correspond to a modern schizophrenia diagnosis. At the time, undifferentiated schizophrenia was a trashcan diagnosis which could cover any thought disorder from anxiety to depression. A 1981 article in the New York Times cites two psychiatrists who examined Greenberg's self-description in the book and concluded that she was not schizophrenic, but suffered from extreme depression and somatization disorder. [1]share