Bettie Page: A Troubled Life

With the passing of Bettie Page, new revelations about her past have again surfaced, here is more information about her life:

Bettie Page was an American model who became famous in the 1950s for her fetish modeling and pin-up photos. She was also one of the earliest Playmates of the Month for Playboy magazine.

Bettie moved to Southern California in 1979. There she had a mental breakdown and had an altercation with her landlady. The doctors that examined her diagnosed her with acute schizophrenia, and she spent 20 months in a state mental hospital in San Bernardino. After a fight with another landlord she was arrested for assault, but was found not guilty by reason of insanity and placed under state supervision for eight years.She was released in 1992 from Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino County.

In one of many biographies about Bettie, "The Real Bettie Page: The Truth about the Queen of Pinups", written by Richard Foster and published in 1997, tells' more of a less than happy tale. Foster's book immediately provoked attacks from her fans, including Hefner and Harlan Ellison, as well as a statement from Page that it was "full of lies," because they were not pleased that the book revealed a Los Angeles County Sheriff's police report that stated that she suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and, at age 56, had stabbed her elderly landlords on the afternoon of April 19, 1979 in an unprovoked attack during a fit of insanity.


Source: wikipedia

Schizophrenia

John Nash, an American mathematician, began showing signs of paranoid schizophrenia during his college years. Despite having stopped taking his prescribed medication, Nash continued his studies and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1994. His life was the source of the biography A Beautiful Mind and the subsequent film adaptation.

Schizophrenia (pronounced /ˌskɪtsəˈfriːniə/), from the Greek roots schizein (σχίζειν, "to split") and phrēn, phren- (φρήν, φρεν-, "mind") is a psychiatric diagnosis that describes a mental disorder characterized by abnormalities in the perception or expression of reality.

It most commonly manifests as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions or disorganized speech and thinking in the context of significant social or occupational dysfunction. Onset of symptoms typically occurs in young adulthood. No laboratory test for schizophrenia currently exists.

A person diagnosed with schizophrenia may demonstrate disorganized and unusual thinking and speech, auditory hallucinations, and delusions. Social isolation commonly occurs for a variety of reasons. Impairment in social cognition is associated with schizophrenia, as are symptoms of paranoia from delusions and hallucinations, and the negative symptoms of apathy and avolition.

In one uncommon subtype, the person may be largely mute, remain motionless in bizarre postures, or exhibit purposeless agitation; these are signs of catatonia. No one sign is diagnostic of schizophrenia, and all can occur in other medical and psychiatric conditions.

Late adolescence and early adulthood are peak years for the onset of schizophrenia. These are critical periods in a young adult's social and vocational development, and they can be severely disrupted.

Those who go on to develop schizophrenia may experience the non-specific symptoms of social withdrawal, irritability and dysphoria in the prodromal period,and transient or self-limiting psychotic symptoms in the prodromal phase before psychosis becomes apparent.



Source: wikipedia