Word: treffert
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...American Psychiatric Association did not recognize the disorder as a legitimate mental illness until 1980. "Multiple-personality disorder is a very, very rare condition. Because of TV talk shows, it has become the disease of the month and the plea of the year," says Dr. Darold Treffert, director of the Fond du Lac County Health Care Center, who is expected to testify for the defense. "It's a condition that's fairly easily induced in a very suggestible patient...
Researchers, however, have been making some progress. Darold Treffert, a psychiatrist in Fond du Lac, Wis., who is a nationally recognized expert on savants, points out that sophisticated tools like computerized scans have improved methods for investigating the functions of the brain. Reading and language ability seem to be controlled by the left side of the brain; art, music and mathematics by the right. Says Treffert: "The skills of the savants are generally right-brain skills, and we know that in many cases of savants there is left-brain damage." He explains, "We think now that the right brain tends...
...Treffert is studying an autistic patient who can listen to a 45-minute opera tape and then play it on the piano and sing it flawlessly. In New York, interest has centered on William Britt, 53, who lived for many years in an ) institution on Staten Island for the mentally retarded. Britt is attending a community college and has had two one-man shows of his paintings. In Connecticut, one 31-year-old man, diagnosed as autistic when a child, has become a gifted pianist. In Baton Rouge, La., Kathy Dial, a child with severe brain damage, has a vocal...
Violence resulting from such situations is almost inevitable. Dr. Darold Treffert, chairman of the board of the Wisconsin State Medical Society, has collected several hundred cases from all over the U.S. of deinstitutionalized patients who, lacking treatment, became involved in violence. Says Treffert: "Most states ended up with three standards for civil commitment: danger to self, danger to others and gravely disabled. We need a fourth standard, for that patient who is obviously ill but not yet deteriorated to the point of being dangerous." The tragic history of the New York ferry slashing underscores just how serious that danger...
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