Diseases

In the book Riptide by Michael Prescott, the whole main point of plot of the book is based on the frequent topic of schizophrenia. The main character Jennifer has a brother with schizophrenia. Her father had schizophrenia and her grandfater. In the book, she found a diary of  women hater/killer "Jack the Ripper" who would kill only women and would cut them open and disbowel them. She is psychologist in the police force and she distingushes the crimminals behave and actions due to the writing and hard evidence found. While reading the diary she discovered Edward Hare-Jack- also had schizo. After Richard was born, her father took a gun and comitted sucide. Jen was nervous that Richard would become violent and soon act like the other two in her family. But she discovers that Richard never does kill, but when he was paranoid, he did get violent and that scared Jen at first. But she realized as violent as he may get, he won't kill.

I think Prescott chose a character close to the m.c. to have this dibilitating disease because he wanted not only to let the plot thicken but also to warn his readers about this disease. How schizo is not something that you can just brush off. It can be potentially dangerous and risky. Some cases are mild, not all are bad but some can be dangerous. You can't always be sure that someone with schizo isn't going to be dangerous. Especially if they don't take their pills, like Richard stopped taking his when he started to feel paranoid. That's when he started to get violent. He went from a mild case b/c of the pills to a dangerous case where he had Sandra at knife point. Of course he didn't kill her or hurt her but i bet that if he had gone longer without taking his pills or if something else freaked him out, he might have just killed her. You can never know for sure how dangerous or mild a case of schizo may be, no matter what a doctor says.

I think the whole point of adding in a dibilitating disease like schizo was to warn readers and thicken the plot but to also show that over all, all emotional based diseases might be dangerous and you shoudl be cautious around whoever has something like that. Not saying that you shoudl treat them like babies, but just always keep in the back of your head that this person has a disease and that it may be dangerous. But it's not with all disease-Breast Cancer for example, how does that pose a threat to other in a harmful way? I mean diseases like schizo, i know there are some like schizo but i can't think of the names. I also think that someone close to him, a female figure in his life, was hurt either emotionally by a disease or person, or physcially by a person. All his m.c.'s so far have been female and bothered and attacked by male figures. Maybe he witnessed or knew someone with any problems like that, or there was no connection and he just wanted to write about it. But point being, diseases are nothing to brush off and hold off on, some can be harmful to others or even yourself.