The Rorschach Test is a series of 10 inkblots used by psychiatrists to uncover personality disorders that might be revealed more easily indirectly than through direct questioning.
The eighth blot of the Rorschach inkblot test (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It was developed by Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychiatrist, as a psychiatric diagnostic tool for schizophrenia and described in his 1921 book, Psychodiagnostik.
Rorschach, son of an art teacher, had enjoyed playing with inkblots and a common game using them since he was a child. But, after getting his medical degree, he started studying the different reactions to them from various children.
For his book, he had studied 300 mental patients and 100 control subjects and settled on a set of 10 inkblots from hundreds he’d used, as the best for diagnostic purposes.
Though Rorschach died only a year after his book was published, probably of a ruptured appendix, his inkblots eventually took hold in the psychiatric world.
By the 1960s, there were five systems for scoring and analyzing Rorschach inkblots.
Into this confusion stepped John Exner, an American psychologist, who first wrote a book that was a comprehensive overview of the various systems in use, The Rorschach Systems, published in 1969.
A few years later, he developed his own system by synthesizing the best parts of the others, making it easier to get similar results from different testers. That book was called The Rorschach: A Comprehensive System.
Though in 2000 20% of correctional psychologists were reported to use the Rorschach inkblot test and 23% of psychologists used it to examine children in custody cases, its value is controversial, with many psychologists claiming it is simply a device to spur conversation between a therapist and a patient but not useful for diagnostic purposes.
That being said, there is evidence it is useful as a measurement tool for its original purpose, schizophrenia, as well as a tool for measuring general intelligence.
Valid or not, many psychologists fear that if psychological tools used to diagnose mental disorders are available to the public they will no longer be useful.
The images, however, are now in the public domain and you can see the 10 Rorschach inkblots and how they are commonly interpreted here.
Carol Covin, Granny-Guru
Author, “Who Gets to Name Grandma? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers”
http://newgrandmas.com
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You know the answer to so many questions — when did schizophrenia become bi-polar disease? Why? Is there really a difference between the two?
Thank you for asking such an interesting question, Grandma KC. Yes, there is a difference, though people often confuse them as mental disorders seem to kind of run together in our minds. Schizophrenia is characterized by hallucinations and delusions. Recent revelations about NSA’s monitoring of our emails notwithstanding, when someone starts talking about the CIA watching them, or sending radio signals through their teeth, this is probably schizophrenia. The fact that it seems absurd to you does not convince them. I used to work with someone who started talking about the CIA watching him, just before he had a mental break and a doctor, who was a partner in the company, had the good sense and kindness to make arrangements to have him hospitalized and he was led out in the middle of a meeting we were having as he started to get incoherent.
Bi-polar is characterized by mood swings – highs (manic) when the person thinks they can do what should take five times as long, talks and acts faster than normal, and lows (depressive) when everything is hard to accomplish. It can be treated by medications to smooth out the mood swings and psychotherapy to convince them they need to take medication. My Mom told me about a boy she was engaged to in college who just dropped off the radar for a week or so. She finally caught up with his best friend and asked him what in the world was going on. “Oh, he just does that sometimes.” “Not to me, he doesn’t. I’m his fiancee. He needs to talk to me.” She broke it off shortly afterwards. I assume now he was probably bi-polar and that was long before the days they had medication to control it.
For more, http://psychcentral.com/lib/th.....der/000633
This post was linked to GRAND Social http://www.grandmasbriefs.com/.....no-75.html
my daughter is a clinical psychologist; when she was in grad school, she had to administer the rorschach test to someone and I volunteered. if anyone asked me though, i’d have to say daughter-mother testing is probably not the best idea.
Daughter-mother testing! You are a good Mom, Belinda. Thanks for the laugh!
Interesting information about the Rorschach test. I never see much in the patterns except the bats/butterflies, so I always diagnose myself as visually unimaginative. (Just stopping by from the Grand Social.)
Thanks, Nancy. They are designed to be ambiguous. So, perhaps you are the rational one!