This is something i came across when I was writing up an information
brief for someone who had to talk about mental health on a travel program.
It is a studied observation that some people go to Jerusalem or Mecca
and have an experience that is described by the mental health system as
Jerusalem syndrome. It's a type of psychosis (to use the medical
language) specific to the location. Of course many people have
epiphanies or intense spiritual experiences out there but this is a
mental illness experience.
What does it mean? Jerusalem (or Mecca) makes people mentally ill? Or
visiting a place to connect with g*d (the preferred Jewish way to write
it if I remember right) and achieving that connection is today called a
syndrome?
The psychiatric model of mental health, and even the biopsychosocial
model, make no attempt to understand the experiences that people go
through in terms of god, spirits or the other alternative perspectives
that people for severe psychiatric states of mind. People don't like to
consider that Abraham in the Bible would be described today a paranoid
schizophrenic.
It takes some delving into the psychiatry textbooks to find any
acknowledgement whatsoever of the role of divinity or spirituality.
Schizophrenia in DSM-IV is sort of caveated by the micro-culture the
person lives, i.e. if the person is born into a religious setting that
has a different explanation for these experiences then, technically,
it's not schizophrenia (I'm unaware if ICD-10 has this refinement).
The only diagnosis I'm aware that still hold some influence from old
treatments is Dissociate Trance Disorder, or spirit possession. 3% of
people who are in psychiatric hospital in India have this diagnosis
according to one study. The interesting thing is a treatments.
Persuading the spirit to leave (an exorcism?) and rubbing their body
with special lotions - the nature of which is unspecified - are two of
the options listed in the most recent psychiatric diagnostic criteria
reference manual (...which I've still got to return....).
I'll get reading some stuff on Jerusalem syndrome at some point.
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