ellion said:
some schizophrenics have delusions with a religious theme, some do not. the percentage of schizophrenics with delusions of a religious nature is on average proportional to the cultural religious population. to say "schizophrenics have illusions of religious nature" gives the wrong impresson of schizophrenia and of the nature of religious expereince.
I don't think you'll find there's evidence for the idea that the proportion of schizophrenics whose delusions are religious matches the proportion of religious feelings in the population as a whole.
The delusional, like people who are troubled for different reasons and with different cause, are more likely to be religious than the population as a whole, but that is just a fact of life.
In fact, that is the literal meaning of the thread title. However, it's clear to me that the implication has been that "Religious delusions are common symptoms of schizophrenia, therefore religious people are delusional and schizophrenic." That, of course, is nonsense.
Schizophrenics who hear voices in their heads are experiencing something outside the normal world of reality. They are directly experiencing something that is not natural, indeed something that is "supernatural". It's hardly surprising, then, that many of them interpret the voices in the context of the one supernatural world model within which they live, or to which they have the easiest access to. Thus, they believe that the voices are "God" or "devils", or occasionally, I suppose, the voices of the souls of the dead.
In
this sense, they are hardly delusional at all! They have heard voices which manifest inside their heads; which are not spoken by anybody in their vicinity; which are not transmitted by an artificial means such as a telephone. Therefore, since the voice is outside the realm of normal reality, it is practically an natural piece of deduction to attribute the voice to that of God.
mis-t-highs said:
live it and then tell me it has nothing to do with religion:
My mother's first episode was when I was 7. (i am now 30) I knew something was wrong when she kept telling the woman at the swimming pool, "don't worry, we're all going home, we're going home!"
since then, she has tried to kill herself several times. She's been catatonic more times than I can count. She's told me of times the rain was made of acid that it would kill me if I walked outside. That the devil had done this.
Every voice in her head was evil. (when she was hearing voices) when the voices were 'bad' it was much easier to snap her out of it. You are more prone to ignore bad voices. But when god starts talking to you and telling you to go to a nursing home and sacrifice an elderly woman, it's harder to ignore. We had to call the nursing home and have them lock their doors in case she got away from us before we could admit her in a hospital.
My last year at college she disappeared. She was supposed to pick up my grandmother from work and she never showed. We just knew we'd find her dead somewhere. We found her one week later across the country. She was catatonic. She had gone up to someone's house, knocked on the door and just stood there. They knew something was wrong. They went through her purse, found our number and called us. We had to get in a train across the country to get her.
My life has been hard. But I love my mother. More than anyone in the world. What I don't understand is the religion thing. This has always been a religion oriented disease for my mum. Everytime she felt good in the church, she would get sick and have to be hospitalized.
What kind of god would do this?
My mother is the nicest woman in the world!!!! She would give you the shirt off her back. Even times when she was the sickest, she would give all of our money away.
My mother does not deserve this mind disease!!!!!!
(not that anyone does)
That's tragic, mis-t, and I truly feel for you. But the point to remember is that your mother would have suffered the disease whether there was religion in the world or not. "It has nothing to do with religion" is not a statement denying that religion is the basis for how the schizophrenic interprets what is happening to them. It just means that the person would be sick in any case.
MedicineWoman said:
M*W: Obviously, you did not read the cited research studies. The research I cited was carried out on patients having specific religious delusions, and not on patients who had a general disassociative disorder.
I don't understand, then. What were you trying to prove? Since the
only people researched were those with religious delusions, it's hard to understand what they are supposed to have learned about the religious aspect of the delusion itself. The forms the delusions take arise out of the culture within which we live. Even the nature of the delusions have nothing to do with Religion in a major sense - no Bible quotations, no theology. Simply the concept of a known supernatural entity called God, or other supernatural entities known as Angels and Demons.
MedicineWoman said:
Hearing one's own voice in one's head is normal. It's called 'thinking.' Hearing someone/something else's perceived voice is not normal. It's called 'delusion.' There is a difference. Not only that, some schizophrenics hear voices coming out of TV talking just to them. I've seen patients with this type delusion, although my patients are generally always obstetric patients. Hormones can really wreak havoc with one's mental state.
Hearing a voice and believing to have some kind of external reality, such as God, actually talking to you is a delusion, doubly so if you act upon it. Suffering a condition in which your brain interprets some kind of anomalous input as a voice in the head is not delusion. There is a difference. Just because something is being "heard" and interpreted by your brain as speech does not make it a delusion. Your brain is, after all, "hearing" something, so something must be causing that hearing. Therefore there is a root physiological cause to the problem. Think of it as something like a loose electrical wire in an apparatus, which causes sparks occasionally. This aspect is what appears to be ignored by the profession, primarily because the majority of people who report the symptom really
are genuinely delusional. But not all of them are.
The "voice in the head" only appears to contain meaning to the "hearer" because the brain filters everything in terms of meaning, which is why we can believe all sorts of nonsensical rubbish in our dreams, etc. I myself occasionally suffer from hypnogogic hallucinations (that is, hearing voices or other specific sounds, when on the point of falling asleep) which I interpret in one, impossible, way, but which were caused by some normal sound in the house.
People who hear voices are routinely diagnosed as "schizophrenics". My view is that not all of them are schizophrenic - ie divorced from reality - and it does them, and science, a disservice to dismiss what they experience as "delusion" simply on the grounds that no-one else can hear what they hear. They're undoubtedly "hearing"
something. What causes that something is what needs further and deeper study. In the meantime, posting a thread on "Religion" about the fact that voice-hearing schizophrenics associate their symptoms with religion, with the implication of the opposite - ie that religion causes the schizophrenia - is debasing the truth.
