Kidney time.

[Holmes' Idiot Brother]

Really? Why didn't the examples look and read like these?

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/brainspotting/202202/schizophrenia-and-writing

M.

Who knows? Each person is different, and there are only two samples provided in the article.

[Mark J D]

Who knows? Each person is different, and there are only two samples provided in the article.

Weak sauce.

The 'From Hell' letter is epistolary Grand Guignol: I have difficulty imagining anything faker. It isn't anything like schizophrenic handwriting or schizophrenic language -- and, yes, I've encountered both, and schizophrenic painting as well. Nor do actual schizophrenics have the head-space to be getting easy spellings wrong and hard spellings right, or to be writing in a way that reads like 'stage Oirish'. What the letter does resemble, oddly enough, is a stupid Victorian's idea that a multiple murderer of this kind would write in a scary way that looked all wild and stabby.

But why are we even talking about schizophrenia? The chances of our man having been schizophrenic are down close to zero. Schizophrenia is not a personality disorder, it's a serious and disabling mental health condition that traps people in psychosis: if the Whitechapel Murderer had been psychotic, he'd have been caught.

M.

[The Rookie Detective]

Weak sauce.

The 'From Hell' letter is epistolary Grand Guignol: I have difficulty imagining anything faker. It isn't anything like schizophrenic handwriting or schizophrenic language -- and, yes, I've encountered both, and schizophrenic painting as well. Nor do actual schizophrenics have the head-space to be getting easy spellings wrong and hard spellings right, or to be writing in a way that reads like 'stage Oirish'. What the letter does resemble, oddly enough, is a stupid Victorian's idea that a multiple murderer of this kind would write in a scary way that looked all wild and stabby.

But why are we even talking about schizophrenia? The chances of our man having been schizophrenic are down close to zero. Schizophrenia is not a personality disorder, it's a serious and disabling mental health condition that traps people in psychosis: if the Whitechapel Murderer had been psychotic, he'd have been caught.

M.

Very true.

I think that's the reason why I dismiss the Ripper having been a lunatic.

Mental Health wasn't understood at the time and anyone displaying considerable psychotic tendencies would have been labelled as a lunatic.

I find it surprising how many of the key suspects were lunatics; because the Ripper killings were the work of a serial killer.


While it is factually and statistically much more likely to be randomly attacked and savagely stabbed to death on the street by a paranoid Schizophrenic with mental ill health; than it would be by a cold calculated Psychopath, the Ripper killings themselves do not lend themselves to the former.

Schizophrenics who kill, are almost always random solitary attacks, perhaps developing into a spree killing if multiple individual victims are at the scene.

Whereas the Ripper killings are the work of a serial killer, even despite the level of aggression with the knife.

There's a fine line when it comes to sanity and insanity, and the Victorians tarnished everyone with the same brush to some extent, but that was partly due to a lack of knowledge and understanding of what they termed "Lunacy."


RD