SCHIZOPHRENIA A MEDICAL MYSTERY pt1

Schizophrenia, a condition which receives a lot of heat and criticism, some it earned while a lot of it is based on ignorance and fear. Imagine a giy walking across the street towards you talking to himself, and he is very dirty and flies are in his long unkept beard. He is singing or pehaps having a phliosophical discussion about the nature of reality within himself. Your first instinct is to run away, because this guy is clearly dangerous and he probably will attack you. Will he? This is most likely nt going to happen as most schizphrenic people are not violent.  https://www.mentalhelp.net/articles/schizophrenia-stigma-and-violence/

The truth is that the violent crime rates of ill people are similar to those of everyone else. You have some good, bad, and ver7y ugly just as there is in any bunch.

Further, not only is this aspect of having schizophrenia incorrect but most aspects of the disease are either largely misunderstood or not known at all. That is, there is a large pot of ignorance stewing about the condition and vast oversimplifications are used to try and bypass what people do not fully understand.

Let's start at the begining of schizophrenia, when it was first documented and what people thought was the cause plus the various means of trying to "treat" someone.

"This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain. ⁴ For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. ⁵ Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones... My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many..."-Mark 5

Video Link:https://youtu.be/iqnE3EY3BRI

Here we have the biblical story Legion where a man who was purportedly possessed terrorized a town and lived in a graveyard. There had been multiple attempts to treat him, but nothing worked. It took Jesus to come and "cast the demons out" in order to heal him. It appears that this intervention by Jesus did have some profound effect on this man, and he indeed appeared to be healed, if you go by the gospel account. Now, this means of recognizing schizophrenia and treatment had been used since prehistoric times before the advent of science. In short, a person exhibiting schizophrenic symptoms would be brought to a witch doctor or some tribal healer in order to be freed from the infliction. Tyhis means is still used by some communities in the 21st century yielding some positive results, however, the results are not always positive, contemporaily speaking or historically. People who are ill are/have been killed in various ways, think the Salem witch trials. This period did progress into another epoch where religion was discarded in the name of science.

In the next part we will look at how people were diagnosed and treated in the 19th century,  the era of the "enlightenment". Here, religion was discarded in favor of a scientific worldview. With the paradigm shift came new means of diagnosis and treatment.