I’m a big fan of Grey’s Anatomy and through the past 10 seasons, they have had pretty much every medical mystery, emergency, and rare case you could imagine. One episode that really stuck out in my mind as we learned about Mood Disorders and Dissociate Personalities was an episode that focused around a teenage girl, Haley, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. According to the book, patients with this type of schizophrenia suffer from hallucinations and delusions, the most common form being auditory hallucinations, when the patient hears voices. As we discussed in class, when it is said that someone is hearing voices, most of the time they are suffering from schizophrenia. Throughout the episode, you learn that Haley was diagnosed months ago and her grandfather had schizophrenia, which follows the consistency of genetics playing a role in this disorder. All Haley is saying when she is at the hospital is that she is not crazy and begging for people to believe her. She is incapable of functioning on her own and even gets to the point where she wants to stab herself with an injection filled with drugs that would kill her.

The doctors do a few tests to see if there is anything they can do to help. They discover that she has a small hole in her ear that causes her to hear every single noise going on inside her body and noises outside her body are amplified. She is not hearing voices inside her head. With a simple surgery, she was cured.

Obviously this is just TV and not a real case, but it definitely has some similarities to what we learned about in class. The first doctors that diagnosed her knew that she was hearing something inside her head, which tends to lead towards schizophrenia, so that is what she was diagnosed. Then when she came to the hospital in Grey’s Anatomy, not until the second round of tests did the doctors realize something else could be wrong. They labeled her as a schizophrenic and let all her other symptoms be explained by her “craziness.” Labeling occurs when people will treat someone differently who has a particular disorder or view them differently. We talked about a real life example very similar to this in class when people who did not suffer from schizophrenia told doctors they heard voices. They acted normally otherwise and answered all other medical questions truthfully. Some of these people were in hospitals for over 20 days for observation because doctors viewed them differently with the schizophrenia label, even though they did not have any of the real symptoms. Labels aren’t always bad, but they can really have a strong effect on how the patient is viewed.

If you’re interested in the clips from the show, below is a YouTube link that has all the clips about Haley and how the doctors discovered what her actual prognosis was.