Jesus was a psycho
Mohammed was a psycho
Buddha was probably a psycho
The guy in the Bharva Gita was a psycho
This is about stigma. First I've chose to use the word psycho in the
sense the public use it. It does mean an abbreviation of psychopath. It
means a crazy person. A person who is severely mentally ill.
The stories of Muhammed receiving the text of the Quran is an experience
that would be pathologised today. He couldn't write much of what he
spouted. It was his wide Sara who recorded what god told him while he
entered states of communication. In these states he'd go pale and sweat.
He'd lose contact with reality in his meetings with god.
Jesus's and Moses and Abraham's lives are harder to accurately determine
if they were psychos. Jesus spoke to god just as Jean D'Arc did. The
voice in their heads. The auditory hallucination which was pathologised
by psychiatry in the 20th century. Moses spoke to a burning bush.
Abraham heard god telling him to kill his son.
I don't know enough about Buddha. He went from being a prince to a life
without the trappings of wealth, a life of contemplation and simplicity
where he rejected the values of the 'normal' world. I assume this comes
about through a change process and these change processes are
pathologised by psychiatry.
It may just have been depression rather than psychosis.
In the Bharva Gita the Hindu demi-god - a man born to the world
therefore not a true god, because anything that is born must die - is
about to war but he wars against his brothers, the Pandavas. As a child
he was so dedicated to archery he decided on his own to try to learn to
shoot arrows in the dark. He is the greatest warrior in the land but he
doesn't want to fight. Before the battle he has a vision and
communicates with a proper god. This god persuades him to fight. This
delusion and the conversation is one of the most significant texts in
the Hindu religion.
It's just a short list of the religious psychos. Any theist is probably
going to hate me by this point. I delibately chose the most stigmatised
word for the concept of severe mental illness. I then applied it to
people who it's heresy to apply any label of mental illness. I've had
the audacity to apply psychiatric concepts to religious heroes. (I'm
aware that in the subtly of psychiatric theory there are certain
exclusions (in DSM at least) for religious or cultural stuff, however I
think it's fair to say that any of these individuals, were they born
today in the UK, would be get a diagnosis from a psychiatrist at some
point and most, without the religious explanation, would suffer the
occupational and social outcomes that form the prognosis of schizophrenia.
It's a bit of a stretch of thinking. The point is about the stigma. I've
attempted to polarise the issue by using the most pejorative word on the
most sanctified people. Many people would be angry at me for calling
Jesus a psycho or severely mentally ill. I'm sure many Muslims wouldn't
be happy with me contemplating a diagnosis of schizophrenia for Muhammed
nor would Jews be happy with the same diagnosis applied to Moses.
Why can't people admit that maybe I'm right? The stigma of madness isn't
true. It's prejudice and ignorance. It forgets that religious heroes,
were they to come in contact with psychiatry, wouldn't be religious
heroes. The prophets, saints and sages would be labelled, drugged and
even hospitalised. There's a quote by a notable psychiatrist from the
1970s that says something along the lines of "had Jesus been born when
psychiatry was around he'd have gone back to carpentry."
It seems almost as if people don't want to believe that severe mental
illness can also be a good thing. "Psycho" conjures up mental visions of
violence and Jack Nicholson's character in One Flew Over the Cuckoos
Nest rather than a guy who gave up his material life to lead a spiritual
life, forgoing the status and security of his royal lineage to do what
Buddha did with his life. Psychiatry in the books and the papers I read
doesn't understand life change through life crisis. It's too complex.
The positivistic scientific framework doesn't understand it.
The stigma of severe mental illness is so strong that I'd be vilified
for attempting to change the root concept by making people understand
that their heroes were also severely mentally ill. The same phenotypes
that are feared as killers (the schizos rather than the psychos, but
they're all the mad) were also people like Gandhi, Marley and Churchill.
The stigma of certain words used by people every day to describe
everyone from the eccentric to real psychopaths could easily be applied
to people that are also held in esteem. The language is different but
the concept they describe is the same, and the words lose their badness
when you realign the underlying concept. It's ok to be a psycho because
it means nothing about an individual. Either positive or negative
interpretations can be made, and the use of language biases the
interpretation of the concept. The concept just is. It's a phenotype.
Circumstances and perceptions mean people make judgements about good and
bad, but these judgements are subjective. No matter how much science is
applied it is just used to justify the pathologisation rather than seek
any truth about the human condition.
The truth is there are a lot of psychos who have done a lot of good for
humanity. And there are a lot of automotons that have done terrible
things. And vice versa.
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