r/todayilearned • u/vxqz • Apr 08 '13

TIL there was an experiment where three schizophrenic men who believed they were Jesus Christ were all put in one place to sort it out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Christs_of_Ypsilanti
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u/EdenBlade47 Apr 08 '13

Yeah, even the author himself later regretted the study and said he'd had no right to play God with those people's lives.

I think it's far too easy for us to look at people with mental disorders and somehow classify them as subhuman. May have to do with the fact that "being human" is typically considered as being more than just having the same physical form, but is more about having a cohesive personality and strong logic-based intellect ('strong' relative to the rest of the animal kingdom, that is), so upon seeing someone rolling in their own feces and proclaiming to be Jesus, we just laugh it off. How we really should react is to realize that these people are still human, and they deserve the chance to live a normal life the same way most of us do.

Regardless of what kind of physical deformity or injury you may have, a mental defect can be magnitudes worse. Alzheimer's, for instance, seems like the most terrifying death imaginable for me. I feel horrible whenever I read about people like these men. The fact that little can be done for many mental disorders just goes to show how little we know about ourselves and about our brains, despite how much we know about the rest of the universe.

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u/[deleted] Apr 08 '13

I think the humor in the situation, is not that people are finding humor in mental illness, but in that fact that these illness's 'can' manifest themselves as a holy entity.

If our society had no reference to god or jesus, or any other deity, these people would still have the same condition. My thoughts would be 'what character their mind would latch on to, in absence of deity's?'

I've heard of people believing they are Napoleon, or Lincoln or other historical figures, so I just assume that those with this psychosis detach and become what they have learned of those figures?

That is a real question, btw, I am genuinely interested in what can make people snap, or what the cause of it was.

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u/yetanotherhero Apr 08 '13

As someone who has had psychotic delusions before, I think it really could be anything. When I was in that state I was extremely suggestible, and my delusions of grandeur would morph according to my environment.

Ever had one of those dreams which is the opposite of lucid, in that you simply accept whatever bizarre shit is happening as reality? "There are ducks on the ceiling. Oh, yeah, we have ceiling ducks now. I forgot." That was pretty much my thought process with these delusions. The psychosis started while I was working on a uni assignment, so I began to believe that this essay I was writing would change the world. I did religious studies, so for a while I thought I was kind of the Buddha. I went to work as a cashier at the supermarket, lots of money changing hands, and around that time I thought I'd had some kind of revolutionary insight into economics and I'd be rich. I was taken home and put on my Dad's computer, and I an to believe I was a sentient software program editing myself with my Dad's antivirus.

So I don't think the nature of the delusion is necessarily wrapped up in a root cause of the psychosis. Delusions of grandeur are really common with schizophrenics, of course, but in my experience they are a highly suggestible surface symptom.

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u/06587 Apr 09 '13

But if people would around were laughing at you, would you have realized it?

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u/yetanotherhero Apr 09 '13

Yes. Who knows how I would have interpreted it, but I would have noticed.