Impressions

     Theresa, a 23-year-old mother of a newborn and a toddler, was the first of the 21 residents to go. She became incoherent at 2 a.m. on a Wednesday. She said she was scared to sleep for fear she wouldn't wake. Two shelter workers listened to her cries. Throughout the night, she talked. At times, her plaints were pitiful. 'I didn't hurt anyone,' she said. 'Why do I feel like this?'
     At one point, she opened a safety pin and began to stick it into her hand. A counselor gently took the pin away.
     By morning, she was calm and more coherent. Counselors decided to escort her to a local hospital. Emergency room attendants checked her physical signs and recommended that she seek psychiatric care. The next day, a psychiatrist prescribed an anti-depressant and suggested that she be placed in a psychiatric facility.
     She was allowed to return to the shelter for another night. That evening, as others settled down with their children, Theresa became incoherent again. She talked in a man's voice, then a child's voice, holding her 5-month-old son in her arms.
     The counselors decided that Theresa needed immediate psychiatric help. Twice during the night, they took her to the hospital, where she was given emergency treatment with pamelor, an antidepressant. Doctors there spoke to Theresa but decided she was not in imminent danger and sent her back to Greentree.
     In the morning, Greentree counselors took Theresa to another hospital, where she was admitted to the psychiatric ward.

[ "No Home and Not Much Hope," Chris Spolar (staff writer), The Washington Post National Weekly Edition, March 27 - April 2, 1989, p. 6. ]

Theresa's bisexual conflict, the cause of her schizophrenic break with reality, is hinted at in this account when she is described as talking "in a man's voice," as well as that of a child's. The fact she would speak like a man shows definite evidence of sexual-identity confusion.

He had been a girl
It had been a trick, a deception.
He bounced back, righted himself.
He assumed his rightful place in the company of men.
He went further, he became a super-boy.
Secretly, he believed in his invulnerable and unique intelligence.
In psychotic transformation he became a superman.
He assumed his rightful place in the company of the gods.
It had been his secret, mythic life all along.
But he was even more special than the gods – he was a mortal who accomplished it on his own.

     Born somewhat late in his parents' lives, he was their only child. His father, known for his heavy drinking and occasional episodes of abuse, maintained an emotional distance from his son. On the other hand, Donald was very close to his mother and was clearly a treasure in her life. They communed with each other about their experience of God and she did her best to protect him. But all the evidence indicates that she was bringing him up as a girl! A photograph of him at the age of six shows him with long curly hair, which hung below his shoulders. He is demurely sitting in his parents' garden in a white sunsuit and gives the unmistakable appearance of being a little girl. His mother had longed for a daughter, and on her insistence his hair was not cut until shortly after his seventh birthday. A picture from that time shows his remarkable change into a little boy, holding his sailboat. Within a year came the first reports of the bravery that was to become the signature of his character.

[ The Seduction of Madness, Edward M. Podvoll, M. D., Harper Collins (Publishers), New York, 1990, p. 109. ]

     Due to his faulty upbringing, Donald was destined to become either a homosexual or a schizophrenic. He rejected his homosexuality and consequently became schizophrenic, thus validating the concept that schizophrenia is the negation of homosexuality. The classic parental configuration of an emotionally distant father and of a close, binding, intimate (CBI) mother invariably produces a son with strong homosexual tendencies. These can either be acted upon or else repressed. If repressed, the outcome for the son will be the development of a neurosis or a psychosis, the strength of the repressed homosexual drive determining the severity of the ensuing mental illness.

     The cross-cultural and cross-species comparisons presented in this chapter combine to suggest that a biological tendency for inversion of sexual behavior is inherent in most if not all mammals including the human species. At the same time we have seen that homosexual behavior is never the predominant type of sexual activity for adults in any society or in any animal species.
     ... The basic mammalian capacity for sexual inversion tends to be obscured in societies like our own which forbid such behavior and classify it as unnatural. Among these peoples social forces that impinge upon the developing personality from earliest childhood tend to inhibit and discourage homosexual arousal and behavior, and to condition the individual exclusively to heterosexual stimuli. Even in societies which severely restrict homosexual tendencies, however, some individuals do exhibit homosexual behavior. In our own society, for example, homosexual behavior is more common than the cultural ideals and rules seem to indicate.

[ Patterns of Sexual Behavior, Clellan S. Ford, PhD and Frank A. Beach, PhD, Harper & Brothers, Publishers, and Paul B. Hoeber, Inc. Medical Books, 1951, pp. 143. ]

Hysterical symptoms hardly ever appear so long as children are masturbating, but only afterwards, when a period of abstinence has set in; they form a substitute for masturbatory satisfaction, the desire for which continues to persist in the unconscious until another more normal kind of satisfaction appears when that is still obtainable.

[ "A Case of Hysteria," Sigmund Freud, p. 79, Vol. 7, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Hogarth Press, London. ]

     What Freud is basically postulating here is that all hysterical symptoms are fueled by, and have their genesis in, old masturbatory fantasies once enjoyed by the patient but now long repressed. Obviously, then, the cure for these present day hysterical symptoms requires a return to those old masturbatory fantasies and the orgasmic satisfactions connected therewith. This results in the diminution and eventual eradication of the hysterical symptoms to the point that the patient is no longer bothered by them and can then proceed to change these archaic orgasmic satisfactions into "more normal kind of satisfaction" if hopefully that outcome "is still obtainable." But as long as these fantasies remain repressed in the unconscious, no real psychosexual growth for the individual so afflicted is possible.
     Thus we can see that one of the primary goals in any person's psychoanalysis is to uncover these archaic and predominantly "perverse," or bisexual/gender confused, masturbatory fantasies which are still clinging tenaciously to life in the patient's unconscious psyche, where they assert such a powerful, regressive effect on the person's overall striving towards psychosexual health and maturity, and then abreact them by orgasmically discharging them as many times as needed until they finally lose for good their sexual power to disturb the psychic equilibrium. Only in this manner will these heretofore repressed masturbatory fantasies at last be robbed of their power to wreak havoc on the individual's psychic health, and the hysterical symptoms will be eradicated, a beneficial result much to be desired in all cases of mental illness.

     It was inevitable that in the quest for motives some consideration should be given to the possibility that the beliefs of Jesus might be explained as those of a mentally abnormal person, perhaps even one clearly deranged. Possibly the merely nascent state of psychiatry furnished one reason why more of the iconoclasts did not venture earlier on this path of inquiry. Noack, (Die Geschichte Jesu, 2nd ed., 1876) referred to Jesus as an "ecstatic," but did not impute mental disease to him – that was left for the 20th century.
     In the first two decades of the 20th century no less than three medical writers embarked upon a psychiatric "interpretation" of Jesus – a German, Dr. Georg Lomer, who wrote under the pseudonym of George do Loosten; a French writer, Charles Binet-Sanglé; and an American, Dr. William Hirsch. A fourth writer, Emil Rasmussen, PhD, included Jesus among a group of prophets whom he classified as psychopathological types. It is to a refutation of these four books that our author dedicates this volume, his thesis offered for the degree of Doctor of Medicine at Strassburg University in 1913. Dr. Schweitzer, already the holder of degrees in philosophy and divinity, had shown himself a sound historian in his Geschichter der Leben-Jesu-Forschung in 1906; in his present study he marshals his historical data effectively, together with the knowledge of mental disorder as it then existed in Europe.
     Since the authors discussed by Dr. Schweitzer agree on one point, namely that Jesus suffered from some form of "paranoia," a few words concerning this type of mental disorder may not be out of place. The word is an old one – it was used in the Hippocratic writings, though in a general sense, as meaning mental disease. It was introduced into German psychiatry as early as 1818 by Heinroth, but with so loose a definition that at one time from 70 to 80 percent of the patients in European mental hospitals were diagnosed as suffering from "paranoia." Indeed, as late as 1887 a French psychiatrist (Séglas), referred to it as a word which had "la signification la plus vaste et la plus mal définie." Gradually it came to include a variety of clinical groups characterized by ideas of persecution and grandeur, in varying proportions. Some of these groups exhibited almost entirely a distortion and misinterpretation of actual facts, others some elaboration with fabrication, while some showed such a loss of contact with reality as to cause the patient to suffer from hallucinations in one or more of the sensory spheres. A religious coloring of the delusions is far from uncommon. Kraepelin, the great German descriptive psychiatrist, defined these various groups – paranoia, paraphrenia (now generally referred to as paranoid condition) and dementia praecox of the paranoid type, his final formulation appearing about 1913.
     To Kraepelin and his school, as to the French school of psychiatry, paranoia was largely a question of constitution; it was based on the makeup of the person, developed insidiously and progressively, and was essentially unamenable to treatment. They looked on it as almost if not quite entirely a disturbance of the intellectual functions. It was only in 1906 that Bleuler emphasized the importance in the disorder of reaction to life situations, as opposed to fatalistic interpretation, and it was after the appearance of Schweitzer's answer to the psychiatrists that a more dynamic interpretation of the mechanisms of paranoia and the paranoid conditions came about as a result of Freud's penetrating observations. (Freud's notes on the Schreber case, published in 1911, were very likely unknown to Schweitzer as he wrote.) We know now, of course, that the emotional and homosexual factors are highly important, and that paranoia is no more a purely intellectual disorder than any other psychosis.

[ Winfred Overholser, M.D., President, American Psychiatric Association, Washington, D.C., 1948, in the Foreword to EThe Psychiatric Study of Jesus – xposition and Criticism. by Albert Schweitzer, The Beacon Press, Boston, 1948, pp. 11-13. ]

... It has dawned on me that masturbation is the one major habit, the 'primal addiction,' and that it is only as a substitute for it that the other addictions – for alcohol, morphine, tobacco, etc. – come into existence.

[ "Extracts from the Fliess Papers," Sigmund Freud, Letter 79, p. 272, Vol 1, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, the Hogarth Press, London.]

     Lucille portrayed also a desire to escape into a fairy-tale world different from her reality. In Figure 16, castle and ships, friendly waves, sirens, and moons are put together to signify a world without anxiety, a place where we too, like the girl on the ship, would like to land. But the patient did not land there. Figure 17, made at the beginning of the illness, portrays already the patient's conflict. Woman is the protagonist. The theatrical setting discloses the drama of woman, as lived by the patient. Woman appears in various poses that reveal grace and beauty in the majesty of the stage of life. But let us look at the two couples in the center of the picture. Strangely, each couple does not consist of a woman and a man, but of two women: one more energetic, not fully dressed, and another one typically feminine in a beautiful evening gown.
     The illness progresses, as shown by Figure 18. Here athletic women have incongruously masculine physical characteristics. Now the desire to be a man can no longer be repressed by the patient, who has tried to fight her own homosexuality. At this point Lucille ceases to be an artist and becomes a schizophrenic patient. (Ibid., p. 359)

[ Interpretation of Schizophrenia, Silvano Arieti, M.D., Basic Books, Inc., New York, 2nd ed., 1974, p. 35. ]

Case A – Patient was a forty-six-year-old divorced man suffering from a psychosis. He had recently broken up with his live-in girlfriend, an event which had triggered his schizophrenic break. He believed he was turning into a woman, and took great pride and pleasure in this fact. During therapy with him it was decided that his male side would be called 'Mars' and his female side 'Venus.' It was pointed out to him that his present psychotic condition was the result of a very severe conflict between his Mars and his Venus. The patient readily agreed with this explanation.
     The thrust of therapy with this patient consisted in the therapist trying to strengthen the patient's Mars while simultaneously allowing his Venus, which had long been deeply repressed, to come out and have her day on stage, so to speak. This she did over a period of several months, while his Mars stood aside and allowed her complete freedom of action and thought.
     On one occasion during this time the therapist mentioned to the patient that he had seen a friend of the patient's drive by with a very pretty blond woman by his side. The patient responded that yes, he knew that, because it was actually the patient himself whom the therapist had seen sitting in the passenger seat of the friend's car. When the therapist countered that on the occasion he was speaking of, it had definitely been a blond female he had seen in the car, the patient replied that yes, he understood that, but the blond was really himself. The therapist then acquiesced to the patient in this matter, seeing that it was futile to differ with him about the identity of the pretty female, as the patient so clearly and emphatically identified himself as being this particular woman.
     At another point during his therapy, the patient brought the therapist a postcard showing a beautiful, voluptuous female lying naked on a bed, with clouds and some angels overhead. The patient told the therapist that the woman shown on the postcard was really himself, as in his psychotic mind this was how he pictured himself at that moment. His Venus was in full bloom at this time.
     Later, as the therapy progressed, the patient's Venus diminished somewhat in power and his Mars began to regain it's rightful place in the patient's psyche.
     Towards the very end of his therapy the patient, in one of his sessions, handed over the above-described postcard to the therapist to keep, stating that it no longer represented what the patient looked like. Shortly after this the patient terminated his therapy. [ A J. Michael Mahoney Case History. ]

     From the moment this schizophrenic patient was able to accept his passive, feminine, homosexual drives on a conscious level and begin assimilating them into his total concept of himself as a man, he was well on the road to recovery from his severe mental illness.

     Most schizophrenics have a homosexual bent or conflict. This was fully confirmed by the histories and psychological tests of our two groups of patients: 27 of the 30 in each group revealed homosexual tendencies. But there was a sharp contrast in expression of the tendency. In the 27 Irish patients the homosexuality was latent but repressed, whereas 20 of the 27 Italians had become overt homosexuals. The underlying factors in both cases are clear. The Italians had rejected a male role out of hostility to their overbearing fathers and elder brothers. Italian men, no less than Irish men, take pride in masculinity; indeed, they are, if anything, more masculine in behavior. But they are also readier to act on sexual impulses, and when they lose their sense of sexual identification in schizophrenic illness, they do not shrink from overt homosexual behavior. Irish men, on the other hand, flee from their identity as males through fear of the mother rather than hostility to the father. All of our Irish schizophrenic patients were either pallidly asexual or latently homosexual. Most of them avoided females. Their homosexuality was repressed because sexuality in general is inhibited in the Irish culture. But it emerged in their fantasies. Indeed, some misidentified themselves as women: one patient had the delusion that the front of his body was covered by an 'apron which bled periodically.'

[ Schizophrenia and Culture, Marvin K. Opler (publication not recorded), August 1957, p. 120. ]

     The patient's [Daniel Paul Schreber] delusional system amounts to this: he is called to redeem the world and to bring back to mankind the lost state of Blessedness. He maintains he has been given this task by direct divine inspiration, similar to that taught by the prophets; he maintains that nerves in a state of excitation, as his have been for a long time, have the property of attracting God, but it is a question of things which are either not at all expressible in human language or only with great difficulty, because he maintains they lie outside all human experience and have only been revealed to him. The most essential part of his mission of redemption is that it is necessary for him first of all to be transformed into a woman. Not, however, that he wishes to be transformed into a woman, it is much more a must according the Order of the World, which he simply cannot escape, even though he would personally very much prefer to remain in his honourable manly position in life. But the beyond was not to be gained again for himself and the whole of mankind other than by this future transformation into a woman by way of divine miracle in the course of years or decades. He maintains that he is the exclusive object of divine miracles, and with it the most remarkable human being that ever lived on earth. For years at every hour and every minute he experiences these miracles in his body, has them confirmed also by voices that speak to him. He maintains that in the early years of his illness he suffered destruction of individual organs of his body, of a kind which would have brought death to every other human being, that he lived for a long time without stomach, without intestines, bladder, almost without lungs, with smashed ribs, torn gullet, that he had at times eaten part of his own larynx with his food, etc.; but divine miracles ("rays") had always restored the destroyed organs, and therefore, as long as he remained a man, he was absolutely immortal. These threatening phenomena have long ago disappeared, and in their place his "femaleness" had come to the fore; it is a question of an evolutionary process which in all probability will take decades if not centuries for its completion and the end of which is unlikely to be witnessed by any human being now alive. He has the feeling that already masses of "female nerves" have been transferred into his body, from which through immediate fertilization by God new human beings would come forth. Only then would he be able to die a natural death and have gained for himself as for all other human beings the state of Blessedness. In the meantime not only the sun but also the trees and the birds, which he thinks are something like "remains of previous human souls transformed by miracles," speak to him in human tones and everywhere around (p. 388) him miracles are enacted."
     It is not really necessary to go further into all the details of these delusional ideas, which by the way are developed and motivated with remarkable clarity and logical precision – the description given should suffice to give an idea of the content of the patient's delusional system and of his pathologically altered conception of the world, and it only remains to mention that also in the patient's behavior, in the clean shaving of his face, in his pleasure in feminine toilet articles, in small feminine occupations, in the tendency to undress more or less and to look at himself in the mirror, to decorate himself with gay ribbons and bows, etc., in a feminine way, the pathological direction of his fantasy is manifested continually. At the same time the hallucinatory processes, as already mentioned above, continue in unaltered intensity and they as well as certain pathological motor impulses are shown by very noticeable involuntary automatic actions. As the patient himself declares, he is very frequently forced by day and night to utter "unnatural bellowing sounds"; he affirms that he cannot control them, that it is a matter of divine miracles, of supernatural happenings, which cannot be understood by other human beings, and these vociferations, based on physical compulsion, and very annoying also for his environment, occur so unremittingly that they disturb the patient's nightly rest in the most painful way and necessitate the use of sleeping drugs. (Signed)

[ Dr. G. Weber, Superintendent of the Asylum (9th December 1899, at Sonnenstein Asylum in Pirna, Kingdom of Saxony, Germany), Area Psychiatrist, Psychiatric Adviser to the Court, as published in Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, by Daniel Paul Schreber, Translated, Edited, with Introduction, Notes and Discussion by Ida Macalpine, M.D., and Richard A. Hunter, M.D., MRCP, DPM, Wm. Dawson & Sons, Ltd., London, 1955, pp. 272-273. ]

Source: An anonymous article by a minister.

Prophets, Apostles, and Mental Illness

     I have kidded for decades about the fact that in my ministerial years I have met at least 23 of the Two Witnesses. One felt he was both of them, thus the odd number.
     I remember going with a minister to a home in Idaho once where the woman heard the voice of God often in her head. She had a young baby so the minister asked me to tend to the baby while he talked to her about her visions and voices. The baby had not had a diaper change in a pretty long time, so I took care of that in the kitchen while the minister tried to help her. Seems she was killing chickens on the farm and trying to resurrect them … without much luck. We never made any connection to the danger and I doubt either of us understood the symptoms of schizophrenia, but I do now. After that, I returned to Ambassador for my last year and was reading the LA Times in the lounge before breakfast. My eye fell on a small article about a woman in a small town in Idaho who was found sitting in her car on a Mountain top waiting for Jesus to return. I knew the name. They found the baby dead on the farm. Or should I say, still dead.
     From the Bible we find a man once laid on his right side for 390 straight days and then flipped over for another 40 because the voice in his head told him to. He built little models of Jerusalem in the sand and laid siege to a stone with a pot (Ez. 4). He even cooked his food with human waste (Ez. 4:9) and dug a hole in his own home and squeezed himself through it with his possessions on his back (Ez. 12). His name was Ezekiel. Maybe he was traumatized by the captivity or the destruction of the symbol of all that was holy and stable to him, the temple. He died forever ago and lots of the stuff he said was going to happen never really did far as we can tell. I hear a lot of minister types quoting him 2500 years later as if you can read the newspaper and immediately see what Ezekiel was talking about. I guess if they lay siege to a rock, lay on their sides for a year or more and give up charcoal for human waste at cookouts, … well … ewwww. Time to find another church. I know most will say that God told him to do these things ... but think about what you are saying. Would you say that about Andrea Yates who God told to drown her kids or Mijailo Mijailovic who killed the Swedish Foreign Minister, Anna Lindh, saying when asked who told him to do it, "I think it was Jesus. That he has chosen me"?
     An Old Testament character, Moses, went up into the mountains a few times because the voice in his head that no one else could hear, called him up for a meeting. He said it was God, but when he came back down the mountain carrying, what he said were the rules from the voice in his head, he ordered the murder of 3000 more pretty nice people, men women and children for not patiently waiting for him. And these people had already had a pretty tough time getting out of Egypt doing what the voice in this guys head told him to do. He had friends killing friends and families. Bummer … that was a heck of a lot of drama and walking for nothing. From what I understand, hardly anyone who fled Dodge City, Egypt believing the voices in this man's head ever made it to the Promise Land. I'm not sure the story really happened, which would be a relief. I just can't imagine this as a good way to begin their understanding of "Thou Shalt Not Kill." This same fellow, was pretty sure that the voice spoke to him from bushes in the desert too. Not a good sign in the world of mental health types.
     Yet again, an Old Testament figure called Abraham, decides to take his only son, up the mountain and kill him as a sacrifice. Perhaps a weird way to say thanks for the son that he could never have before. But I'd think that was going a bit too far. Reminds me of cutting off the nose to spite the face. Anyway, the voice in his head said to and then decided it was only kidding. The child, who probably refused ever again to go on any "just a campout" with dad, was replaced by an animal conveniently stuck in a nearby bush.
     What's the chance of that! I can't imagine Isaac ever quite trusted ol' dad again.
     There was a guy who married a prostitute because the voice told him to. We had to drop the standard laws of marriage for this one, but it's ok if you are doing it for God. Man was his wife mad about that! The guy even began to think he was a reincarnated form of the guy before him who talked to the bush. Tons of people obeyed this guy for a time, but usually not for very long. Hosea I think.
     The more I think about it, the more I have to admit that voices in the heads of people I never met, and no one at that time could hear themselves, have played a really big role in who gets the final say in religion. What if … Nah.
     Paul in the New Testament fell off a donkey when he heard a voice in his head about giving Jesus a hard time in his old job. He even saw a flash of light in his head, brighter than the sun and it was already noon when this happened! That's pretty darn bright! When people in the Bible light up, it's ALWAYS brighter than the sun. You'd think more people would notice. The others either heard the voice but did not see the light, or saw the light but not the voice, stood up, or all fell down depending on the story your read in the Bible. The voice in Paul's head told him it was time to change jobs and he'd get his vision back from a guy in town if he did what he was told. Today we might say he had all the symptoms of a sunstroke or maybe even temporal lobe epilepsy where voices and flashes are pretty darn common along with an intense sense of morality that others must get in tune with.
     Paul went on to write most of the New Testament and continue to tell people nothing about any real Jesus he had ever met. No stories, no miracles, no teachings, nothing about the 12 guys Jesus had to follow him, and I would expect to have passed the teachings on to others. Maybe even write something about Jesus, after all there were 12 of them! But alas, they didn't much and we have no clue what happened to that bunch. It's all hearsay. Some say that they were merely a symbol of the twelve signs of the zodiac surrounding the central sun/son, and not real people, but let's not go there.
     Paul spoke volumes about the one who spoke to him in his head and he saw often in visions. When he gave the instructions for eating the body and blood of Jesus, he said very plainly Jesus himself told him about the details of that. Paul never met the real Jesus so I'm pretty sure he meant in vision. When he said, “have I not seen the Lord?” he didn't mean in person. He meant in his visions. He even took a trip to the third heaven, but said the stuff he saw was too much to share at this time … Hey!
     At any rate, Paul ends up in Rome for some unnamed offense and disappears. Sometimes I think his death or execution must have been an embarrassment to the church as the last we hear of him, he is under house arrest having a pretty good time. I'm sure they knew how it ended for the guy and why, but it might have annoyed the early Christians to know the truth of it all, so they left it out.
     I even heard or read in the book of Mark that Jesus mom and brothers came down to Jerusalem to get him because THEY thought he was “mad.” I don't think they thought he was angry, but rather a bit daft. Jesus kind of blew them off in a way that would have got me slapped by my dad for being so rude to mom. It was like he didn't know them. Mary had evidently completely forgotten about his wonderful birth story and all those great things she kept and pondered in her heart. Besides he had to do what the voice in his head said.
     Later, other guys who wrote about Jesus dropped this hot little tale and told a really cute story about how Jesus came to be. God himself had visited her, well no, I guess the Holy Spirit did. You know the third thing in the Trinity and she was pregnant by no less than the Deity. She burst into song about this in Luke and seemed to know that Jesus was literally "fully God and fully man," whatever that means. I can understand one thing being fully something, but not two things being fully the same thing but different and coequal but not. Oh never mind. Church talk. I guess it's one of those mysteries we hear about when one story leads to the next and we tie ourselves in a knot, wrapped in a enigma, coated with cheese.
     Matthew tells a great story of Jesus birth, different from Luke's, but at least they cleaned up that embarrassing tale about Jesus being hauled away by his family for being nuts. Mark must have been mistaken according to Matthew and Luke, but Mark was the embarrassing story and came before the cute story, I suspect it had a ring of truth to it, at least as Mary saw it. Sometimes I wonder if Jesus was so anxiety ridden not to know who his real father was that he took mom literal when she got tired of him asking and said "God is your father." Who knows?
     I always found it interesting that the poor kid in the New Testament who threw himself in both the fire and water often, or maybe just fell in them when this hit him, cried out, foamed at the mouth and then recovered pretty quickly when the demon was put out, had all the symptoms of infantile epilepsy. Every one!
     Some say his cursing trees for having no fruit at a time of year when there is not supposed to be fruit, or attacking the legitimate money changers in the temple who really were simply changing pagan money into temple scrip for the purchase of sacrifices, were not good signs of quality mental health. That last act probably got him killed by the Romans, though somehow it ended up being the Jews fault. I guess it was easier and a bit wiser to blame the Jews who could not hurt you, rather than the Romans who could kill you. At any rate, this temper thing is not a good sign of good mental health.
     I wonder how people back then would treat a kid with epilepsy! It runs its course in about 30 minutes so it would sure appear that the old demon was banished. I also wondered as a kid, what a kid would have to do to get a real demon lurking in his body. Must have been some weak minded kid to let that happen. I remember as a kid hoping no demon would jump on me. I'd vote infantile epilepsy and not blame the folks of 2000 years ago for not knowing the symptoms or how it manifested. Anyway, the demon was put out, but we don't know if it ever came back. Jesus had a hard time doing this stuff in his hometown because a prophet has no honor in his own town or with his own family. Well duh! They know you pretty darn well and got so concerned they came down to retrieve you for your own good, if you believe Mark. Of course he blamed the weak faith of the group, but maybe that's because they all know you so well and aren't easily convinced. I mean, if Jesus was God, really, really, really GOD, would the force be thwarted just because the neighbors who knew you as a kid had a hard time accepting that? I think not! Since when does being God in the flesh depend on the acceptance of the people who know you best?
     I once read a story about Jesus where, as a child he kills another playmate for some offense towards him. Gosh, I hope that didn't really happen but I can see why it never made the cut. I guess Jesus could have heard about Moses knocking off the Egyptian for picking on a buddy and God said it was ok to express your anger that way if you need to.
     Jesus also got rid of a whole legion of demons in a man that lived in a cemetery, naked and was really an angry guy that was so strong he broke the chains they tried to bind him in. I guess that was sorta the lithium of the times … chains. Anyway, aside from this man having every symptom of schizophrenia, all the demons got thrown into a herd of pigs and they ran down into the sea from a town no where near the sea and drown. Kind of a marathon run and by the time they got there, they'd be skinny and pooped out pigs. But this is another story. Boy, I bet that made the farmer mad at Jesus! Of course, this would not be a Jewish farmer so it's ok. In the OT, if you found some animal that was defective, you couldn't eat it yourself, but you could sell it to the pagans, so hey, not your problemo.
     Anyway ... I guess we could really wonder about the book of Revelation ... Whoa … that is some good drugs! Whoever wrote that was one angry human being … Death, destruction, fire, plagues, trombones, vials and all sorts of stuff pour out on everyone! This Jesus is not such a nice guy. Sometimes I get to thinking the one in the Gospels can't possibly be the same one as the guy in Revelation, but that's what they say. The one in Revelation seems like an end stage schizophrenic gone amuck. I'm not sure I could be comfy in heaven or the kingdom with one who could be so freaking mean to everyone except those special ones. I always felt a few seminars or maybe a refresher type program would send a kinder gentler message, instead of all the butt kicking, death and destruction. Maybe a nice lunch between encouraging sessions and a Luau in the evening where we could all marvel at actually meeting the real God and Jesus. And hey … if the presenter is really God or Jesus come down …I mean really really … I'd listen and be good. But alas, this Jesus in Revelation is a case … maybe literally. It's just one big vision in someone's head hearing voices again that others can't hear and seeing things others don't see. Makes me nervous. And people today base their entire life perspective on a vindictive vision expressed almost as a "oh yeah, well this is what you get for not believing me." Nuther symptom. Vengeance.
     Someone once asked what's the difference between a Bible Prophet or Christian fundamentalist and a paranoid schizophrenic? Well, one hears voices in their head, has a heightened moral code, is judgmental yet can be very deceptive and manipulative, has delusions of being on a mission from God, sees things that no one else present sees, hears things that one else hears, sees lights in his head, is the center of the universe and has special knowledge that must be kept secret until the right time and then can only be understood as explained by the one. The other, of course, is a paranoid schizophrenic.
     I had a close friend in high school who in college came down with the classic symptoms of schizophrenia. Very intelligent but all of a sudden was overcome with the chemistry of schizophrenia that comes mostly between 18 and 35. He simply could not function in this world. His perceptions and his reality were far different than even he could understand. He died in his chair, alone in a dingy apartment last year. I wish I had gone to see him. Nice kid.
     What if most, some or even ONE of the characters of religion, are humans who suffered from certifiable mental illnesses? What if some get followings because they are so darn fascinating and in combo with reading the Bible can seem so right? Perhaps we are dealing with traumatized human beings and their coping mechanisms. Schizophrenic and paraphrenic personalities can be brilliant yet fragile. A narcissist can rise to amazing heights of success and productivity. They can have "beautiful minds" and be very, very ill. They make great dictators and Televangelists.
     We know more now than we did 3000 years ago. And yet when it comes to the Bible and those who declare themselves the special men of God, we go as blind as Paul claimed to go on the road to Damascus. (Even though Paul himself never says this was the mechanism of his conversion. Perhaps even worse, like Jeremiah and Jesus, he was called before birth in the womb as he notes in Galatians.) Pretty darn special! And yet we can allow that kind of perspective to be religious when today, we would get very uncomfortable with a real person saying that about themselves. What seems ok as long as it is in the distant past becomes freaky if in the present. Many who turned away from Paul or an Ezekiel may have had that gut level discomfort. I doubt anyone today would feel a religious zealot who cooked dinner with his own dung would be anything but twelve short of a dozen.
     Why is this an issue? Because a minister, maybe sincere, and maybe simply mentally unstable or delusional can hide in the ministry much better than he can hide at IBM. A minister that is prolific, charismatic while also dictatorial and delusional looks spiritual and obedient. The quirkiness is mistaken for spirituality and obedience to God. They have the ability to be deceivingly compassionate one minute and intensely angry at anything and everyone the next. They don't like to be contradicted, corrected nor have their mental processes questioned. They NEVER take personality tests! How is it that normal human beings, who have accurate perceptions about the mental instability of some at work, then lose that instinct at church? The quirkiness at work becomes the spiritually desirable trait in church! Go figure!
     When Alexander Haig declared himself in charge of the government after the Reagan shooting, he was torn to shreds for his misstep and is still trying to explain it. But when a pastor type declares himself a "Watcher" or an "Apostle" or a Prophet or incredibly more special than the average human, it gets swallowed hook, line and sinker?
     What if the behaviors recorded thousands of years ago that has been the basis for so much religious zealotry is simply better understood in the context of mental illness? We always say if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and swims like a duck, there is a good chance we may be dealing with a duck.
     When it comes to religion however we change our perceptions. If it walks like a narcissist, if it talks like a Para or schizophrenic and if it has all the symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy, it must be a man of God!
     What if some of the many heroes of faith, even some of the biggies, were simply mentally ill as we understand it today? Wow…what a thought! Makes you think doesn't it?

[ Source: E-mail communication from the www.Schizophrenia-TheBeardedLadyDisease.com website. ]

     Consider C. A. Tripp and his argument that Lincoln was gay. His book, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln begins with the fact that Lincoln during his late 20's and early 30's shared a bed with a young man named Joshua Speed. As President, Lincoln may also have shared his bed with a captain of his guard in Washington. … As I dug into the story, I learned about the two times, at ages 26 and 32, when Lincoln broke down so severely that he came near suicide; about his profound gloom in his middle years and his deliberate work to cope with it; and finally, about how his depression both plagued him and fueled his great work as President.

[ The True Lincoln, Joshua Wolf Shenk, "Time Magazine," July 4, 2005, pp. 42-43. ]

     Different from the dancer's first admission to Bellevue was his seeming absence of fear. Instead of the earlier dread that something awful might happen, that he might be put to death or die of a heart attack, this time he deliberately sought danger and assaulted others as well as himself with unbridled fury. Similarly absent this time was any inhibition of homosexuality.- Nijinsky tried openly to seduce his male attendant, kissed his hands and feet, and said to him, 'You are my wife.' So insistent was he in trying to remove the attendant's wedding ring that the latter finally had to take his ring off and hide it. Nijinsky also chased one of the male doctors and tried to grab his wedding ring. When the doctor resisted, Nijinsky 'hit him and then wept.' He seemed more confused than ever before. The staff observed him 'talking to himself, taking off his shirt and kneeling in front of his attendant with folded hands, eyes screwed-up, gnashing his teeth, ejaculating loud screams and spitting at the attendant.' While in the bathtub, Nijinsky 'made every possible sort of movement with his body.' suggesting the religious ecstasies of saintly Russian catatonics, or an attempt at orgasm. Occasionally, he pointed to his navel, saying, 'This is a woman or an idea.' He may have been trying to express an attitude in regard to Romola's pregnancy, much as he did in 1913, while expecting their first child, or he may have wanted to give birth himself, perhaps to a new idea. He kept talking nonsense, 'emitting words that did not hang together: planet, detective, airplane, medicine, art.' (Ibid., p. 256)

[ Vaslav Nijinsky, A Leap into Madness, Peter Ostwald, Carol Publishing Group, New York, 1991, p. 189. ]

      Most schizophrenics have a homosexual bent or conflict. This was fully confirmed by the histories and psychological tests of our two groups of patients: 27 of the 30 in each group revealed homosexual tendencies. But there was a sharp contrast in expression of the tendency. In the 27 Irish patients the homosexuality was latent but repressed, whereas 20 of the 27 Italians had become overt homosexuals. The underlying factors in both cases are clear. The Italians had rejected a male role out of hostility to their overbearing fathers and elder brothers. Italian men, no less than Irish men, take pride in masculinity; indeed, they are, if anything, more masculine in behavior. But they are also readier to act on sexual impulses, and when they lose their sense of sexual identification in schizophrenic illness, they do not shrink from overt homosexual behavior. Irish men, on the other hand, flee from their identity as males through fear of the mother rather than hostility to the father. All of our Irish schizophrenic patients were either pallidly asexual or latently homosexual. Most of them avoided females. Their homosexuality was repressed because sexuality in general is inhibited in the Irish culture. But it emerged in their fantasies. Indeed, some misidentified themselves as women: one patient had the delusion that the front of his body was covered by an 'apron which bled periodically.'

[ Schizophrenia and Culture, Marvin K. Opler (publication not recorded), August 1957, p. 120. ]

     Now Cauchon, as an advocate experienced in dealing with the law, knew that, according to the rules of the Inquisition courts, none but those who, having recanted their heresy, had relapsed, could be condemned to suffer death by burning. And having succeeded in making the wearing of man's clothes (it is certain, from the evidence given by Jean Massieu, that the wearing of such clothes was expressly mentioned in the cédule) the symbol of Joan's failure to submit to the Church, he might be fairly sure that she would, without much delay, show herself to have relapsed by retaining her male attire. Events were soon to prove him right. (Ibid., p. 218)
     ... Sunday, May 27th, Cauchon learned that Joan had resumed male attire. On the following day he went to the prison, accompanied by the vice-Inquisitor and several assessors. The following is from the official record:
     'The Monday following, 28 of the month of May, on the day following Holy Trinity, we, judges aforesaid, went to the place of Joan's prison to see her state and disposition. Were present the lords and Masters Nicolas de Venderes, Thomas de Courcelles, Brother Isambart de la Pierre, Guillaume Haiton, Jacques Camus, Nicolas Bertin, Julien Floquet and John Gray.'
     'Joan was dressed in a man's clothes, to wit tunic, hood and gippon (a short robe worn by men) and other man's clothes, attire which on our order she had formerly left off and had taken women's clothes: therefore did we question her to know when and for what cause she had again put on man's attire.'
     Joan: I not long since resumed man's attire and left off woman's attire.
     Question: Why have you assumed this male attire and who made you take it?
     Joan: I have taken it of my own will. I have taken it because it is more licit and fitting to have man's clothes since I am with men than to have woman's clothes. I have resumed it because what had been promised me has not been observed, to wit that I should go to mass and should receive the Body of Christ and should be taken out of irons.
     Pierre Cauchon: Have you not made abjuration and promised especially not to resume man's clothes?
     Joan: I would rather die than remain in irons; but if it be permitted me to go to mass and I be taken out of irons and that I be put in a pleasant (gracieuse) prison, and that I have women, I will be good and will do what the Church wishes. (The item 'have women' is down in the French Minute but not in the official text of the proceedings.)
     Cauchon: Since that Thursday, have you heard the voices of Saints Catherine and Margaret?
     Joan: Yes.
     Cauchon: What did they tell you?
     Joan: God has sent to me by Saints Catherine and Margaret great pity for the mighty betrayal to which I consented in making abjuration and revocation to save my life, and that I was damning myself to save my life.
     (Here the clerk has noted in the margin, responsio mortifera, mortal (fatal) answer.)

[ Joan of Arc, by Herself and Her Witnesses, Regine Pernoud, Stein and Day, New York, 1969, p. 220.]

     Though simple and hebephrenic schizophrenic reactions become visible during early and middle adolescence, the characteristic reaction is that of an acute catatonic episode. Catatonic reactions are by far the most frequent schizophrenic disorganizations seen during this period and, side by side with the acute conversion reactions, constitute the bulk of emergency psychiatric difficulties during adolescence. Catatonic episodes can develop in a matter of hours and express themselves in great motor inhibition or overactivity, highly overactive and paranoid thought and speech patterns, totally inhibiting panic or desperate grandiosity. Fears centering around homosexuality, sexual inadequacy, or sexual guilt, together with a remarkable concern with philosophic and religious issues of a grandiose nature, almost universally accompany such reactions. Characteristically, catatonic patients have the ambivalent wish to change themselves or feel that they have been transformed into another sex. They wish to change the world immediately, to purify it and bring news to everyone else that has been given them in a revelation. Quite often such wishes are put into action in totally inappropriate and aggressive ways that are disturbing to the people in the patients' environments.

[ Sydney L. Werkman, American Handbook of Psychiatry, Vol. II, edited by Gerald Caplan, Basic Books, Inc., New York, 2nd ed., 1974, p. 230. ]

     G. V. Hamilton also observed homosexual relations between male monkeys. He reports the occurrence of anal intercourse and so far as one can tell, the details are similar to those listed by Kempf. Hamilton describes a homosexual friendship between an adult and an immature male macaque which was accompanied by frequent sodomy, mutual embracing, and social protection of the young animal by his full-grown partner. When the pair was separated the adult male mated readily with available females; and when the smaller male was reintroduced into the enclosure, the homosexual partnership was resumed, although heterosexual coitus on the part of the grown animal was not appreciably reduced.
     Carpenter reports the occurrence of homosexual mounting by free-living male macaques, but Kempf and Hamilton are the only writers who have observed complete anal intercourse between males.

[ Patterns of Sexual Behavior, Clellan S. Ford, PhD, and Frank A. Beach, PhD, Harper & Brothers, Publishers, and Paul B. Hoeber, Inc. Medical Books, 1951, p. 135. ]

     According to Zuckerman, homosexual behavior frequently occurs in the baboon family group. All the members may be involved. The responses include mutual grooming, genital examination, and sexual mounting. Adult males of this species living in the native state sometimes present sexually to one another and mounting may follow.
     Bachelor baboons who have restricted opportunities for contact with females sometimes strike up homosexual friendships, and for a time a masculine pair remains constantly together. Immature males often join full-grown bachelors and engage in sexual activity. Pre-pubertal and adolescent males show a wide range of sex responses. They display the feminine sexual presentation, masturbate, and mount one another. They also mount and are mounted by adult members of their own sex. And they engage in manual, oral, and olfactory genital examination with other males of their own age.

[ Patterns of Sexual Behavior, Clellan S. Ford, PhD and Frank A. Beach, PhD, Harper & Brothers, Publishers, and Paul B. Hoeber, Inc. Medical Books, 1951, pp. 135. ]

     The patient appeared apathetic, withdrawn, and could not even express his delusions. Occasionally, however, he would make remarks that were very revealing. He could not look people in the eyes because they would find out things of which he was ashamed. He felt he could not get along with people in the hospital; they would laugh at him or make unpleasant remarks about him. They would refer to him as a 'she,' not 'he.' At times they were saying what he was thinking.

[ Interpretation of Schizophrenia, Silvano Arieti, M.D., Basic Books, Inc., New York, 2nd ed., 1974, p. 638. ]

     All through his childhood he had been very fond of playing parts in front of the mirror. Now in front of the mirror he continued to play parts, but in this one special instance he allowed himself to become absorbed into the part he played (to be spontaneous). This he felt was his undoing. The parts he played in front of the mirror were always women's parts. He dressed himself up in his mother's clothes, which had been kept. He rehearsed female parts from the great tragedies. But then he found he could not stop playing the part of a woman. He caught himself compulsively walking like a woman, talking like a woman, even seeing and thinking as a woman might see and think. This was his present position, and this was his explanation for his fantastic get-up. For, he said, he found that he was driven to dress up and act in his present manner as the only way to arrest the womanish part that threatened to engulf not only his actions but even his 'own' self as well, and to rob him of his much cherished control and mastery of his being. Why he was driven into playing this role, which he hated and which he knew everyone laughed at, he could not understand. But this 'schizophrenic' role was the only refuge he knew from being entirely engulfed by the woman who was inside him, and always seemed to be coming out of him.

[ The Divided Self, R. D. Laing, Penguin Books, Baltimore, Maryland, 1965, p. 72. ]

I am indebted to Dr. Will Elgin, of the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, for another repeated observation which, because it is characteristic, needs reporting. For many years Dr. Elgin, in the process of admitting patients, observed the enactment of a scene which assumed diagnostic significance. His office arrangement permitted relatives a choice of three seats, one opposite his desk, one at the end of it quite near him, and one several feet away. He observed that when the mother and father of the patient appeared together to arrange admission, there occurred something of significance. If mother sat in one of the two chairs at his desk, and father sat off in a corner, it usually followed that mother took over the discussion, did the talking, made the arrangements, and even read the fine print on the contract. Father, meanwhile, looked unhappy and was silent save for an occasional abortive effort to modify certain of the mother's statements. When this was the course of the admission interview, he came to know that the odds were that the patient would be schizophrenic. There is an interesting addendum. In a later interview father, appearing alone, was often very aggressive in his criticism and his demands and accusations. However, it could often be demonstrated that his belligerence was that of a very unwilling agent of his wife.

[ Psychotherapeutic Intervention in Schizophrenia, Lewis B. Hill, M.D., Ibid., p. 106. ]

If we summarize our impressions of the attitudes of these mothers toward their own parents, we may say that as a group they reported that they loved their fathers or felt that they had some love from them. But, on the whole, the fathers were weak, sometimes brutal, absent, and in one way or another quite inadequate and unreliable. Frequently also there was some feeling that the fathers were either somewhat abnormal heterosexually or were regarded as possibly homosexual. On the other hand, these mothers of schizophrenics nearly uniformly report their respect for their mothers. Almost without exception, they give the impression that they are saying not only that they respect their particular mothers but that through their mothers they have come to idealize motherhood – they believe in the divinity of maternity. This is not an uncommon idea in our culture, but one feels that these women are more desperately devoted to it than are the run of people. The maternal grandmothers of the patients are usually reported to have ruled their homes either directly or, more commonly, through tears and suffering. Mothers of the patients have learned this technique from these grandmothers and with very few exceptions dominate, in one way or another, the family situation, including the husband. Usually they employ the hurt techniques to make others feel guilty; much more rarely they are arbitrarily and angrily in charge. As for the relation to the children, these mothers, in addition to reporting them as model children, also most frequently remark that as little children the patients worshipped their mothers; they frequently comment that they still do.

[ Psychotherapeutic Intervention in Schizophrenia, Lewis B. Hill, M.D. (Ibid., pp. 112-113). ]

Another patient was a schizophrenic adolescent who had received intensive shock therapy at another institution during the course of which he suddenly developed a high-pitched voice. The psychiatrist was uncertain whether he was trying to mimic a girl or a child. When the patient was told that it seemed as if he wanted to be a child, he replied, 'I don't want to be any older. I want to play children's games.' When asked if he saw no fun in being older, he answered, 'Yes, but that has to do with sex. Sex is ugly. Sex has a lot to do with growing up. I don't want to commit myself to sex. The real trouble started when I dyed my hair when my mother wasn't there. I began putting on women's clothes ...' and so on.

[ Homosexuality, A psychoanalytical Study of Male Homosexuality, Irvin Bieber et al., Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 1962, p. 212. ]

16

There is an apocryphal story (told to me by Frederick G. Worden), of a ward set up for young, male, acute paranoid schizophrenics in which all the personnel were overt homosexuals: tender, overt homosexuality was encouraged among the patients and staff. The story is that the cure rate was high.

[ Splitting (A Case of Female Masculinity), Robert J. Stoller, M.D., Dell Publishing Co., Inc., New York, 1973, p. 372. ]

Such a differentiation permits a speculative reconstruction of the schizophrenic process which would run as follows. For a variety of reasons – for example, hostility, harshness – the child in the earliest period of life loses confidence in its identity, its worth as a human being of its given sex. Obviously ordinary traumas such as neglect are not sufficient: the hostility or over-demandingness must treat the child like an object with no intrinsic worth of its own. Perhaps the parents unconsciously hate the child's sex or maybe the child senses that to be so despised he must be the wrong sex. Whatever the specific causes may be, one aspect of the general self-disconfirmation the child experiences is to lose (or never gain) confidence in his gender role identity, sometimes feeling like a member of the opposite sex or more often just alien from his own. This lack of gender security tends to influence style of approach to life, especially in the critical adolescent years when the sex roles begin to diverge markedly. Sex-role alienation is manifested primarily in passivity and defective instrumentality among males but is most apparent in the expressive functions among females, taking the form of hostile belligerence and emotional insensitivity when hospitalized. (It remains an open question whether the assertive quality of the behavior observed in female schizophrenics is a secondary by-product of expressive disruption or represents a fundamental divergence from the classical developmental picture of inhibition and social withdrawal in preschizophrenics.) But at the same time, schizophrenics of both sexes are perceived and treated usually by all at home and at school as members of their correct biological sex groups so that they develop more or less normal interests and opinions characteristic of their sex. What is crucial in schizophrenia is a serious disturbance at the primary or identity stage; conflicts at the secondary level of style of approach to life may lead to neuroses and at the tertiary level of interests to social maladjustments. But at any level, sex-role integration appears to be a crucial factor in adjustment.

[ "Sex-Role Alienation in Schizophrenia," David C. McClelland and Norman F. Watt, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. 73, No. 3, 1968, p. 238. ]

During his stay in that hospital, he did not show improvement. He was transferred to the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital on January 27, last. After discussing his life up to the time of his brother's enlistment, in our initial interview, he was asked if he had missed his brother. He replied: 'Oh ... He had his friends and went around with girls, too. I had friends, but ... I could not keep up ... They were a little ahead of me ... Well, socially and ... monetary reasons, too.' Here he referred to a doctor with whom he had had some interviews, saying thereafter 'I slept with my brother 'till the war *** that homosexual feeling H – [the doctor] spoke of. I'd tell him ... anything, and ... it seemed I got worse and worse. All our actions and talks were tensions between us, you see. It was on the morning of the eclipse ... I was relating it to myself ... and the morning it came, I was wild, I thought I was dying or something. *** I was supposed to be in hell, I guess ... and they had a language there; I'd hear things ... I couldn't smoke a cigarette or drink water *** The whole thing was like going through a dream ... I was two persons; one night, a man and a woman; and the next, two men. *** Called all sorts of damnable things – dog, cock-sucker ... everything that I had ever heard.' Later in the discussion, he volunteered 'Never had intercourse with a woman; never seen a naked woman: have fooled around when I was on the road'; the latter had occasioned two incidents of ejaculatio praecox some short time before his acute episode. He shied at any discussion of the homosexual goal, saying amiably but with tension, 'Don't talk to me about those things, I will get all mixed up again ... I think I know what ails me ... my feelings have got swung around.' Inquiry as to what he meant increased his discomfort.

[ Schizophrenia as a Human Process, Harry Stack Sullivan, M. D., W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1962, p. 75. ]

... They both reported finding Bretnall dead when they entered the house; she was disemboweled and her eyes were gouged out.
[Name deleted] was found next to the mutilated Bretnall stabbing herself in the neck while reportedly saying, 'I am the devil. I was making love to her. I killed her.'
... Those who knew [Name deleted] said that for months before the slaying she had been tormented by psychological demons, threatening to hurt or kill or commit suicide. She had been in and out of the mental health crisis unit at Marin General Hospital. In one instance, she wound up there after slashing her hands and legs with a razor knife at Northgate Mall in San Rafael.

[ "Slaying Stirs 911 Probe," Alex Neil, Marin Independent Journal, Nov. 27, 1990, p. A9. ]

Frazier, an auto mechanic who appeared in the courtroom one day with the left side of his head, beard and eyebrows shaved, pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

[ "Woman Painfully Recalls Family's Brutal Murder," Dawn Garcia (staff writer), San Francisco Chronicle, October 20, 1990. ]

Altogether, 22 percent had had contact with the police for bizarre or inappropriate behavior as part of their first episode of schizophrenia, including such events as the strangulation of a pet canary, cutting off the heads of the flowers in the family garden, and a male graduate student walking through a quiet suburb in lady's underpants embracing each exposed garbage can.

[ Schizophrenia Genesis (The Origins of Madness), Irving I. Gottesman, W. H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1991, p. 192. ]

Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum, to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed.

[ The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962, ( Transcribed from the original manuscript at Smith College, edited by Karen V. Kukil ), Anchor Books, New York.) ]

Phil Morowski, an acquaintance, said that when McVeigh [ Timothy J., the Oklahoma City bomber who killed 168 people in the Federal Building there ] returned from the Gulf War, he complained that the Army had implanted a computer chip in his buttocks apparently to keep track of him.

[ Lee Hancock and David Jackson, Dallas Morning News, (reprinted in the Marin Independent Journal, Marin County, California, April 23, 1995, p. 1.) ]

At 17, he joined the marines to get away from his mother, but he was unable ever to shake the sense of perpetual grievance with which she had imbued him, or his anger at a world that stubbornly refused to grant him the recognition she had taught him should be his.
Not surprisingly, the military did not suit him. Cold, sarcastic, withdrawn, he was taunted as 'Ozzie Rabbit' and 'Mrs. Oswald' by his fellow marines, and was court-martialed and found guilty twice, first for shooting himself in the arm with a .22 pistol he was unauthorized to carry and again for pouring a drink over the head of a sergeant who had dared assign him to K.P. duty. He subsequently suffered an apparent breakdown, weeping and firing shots into the night while on guard duty. After that he was called 'bugs.'

[ Case Closed - Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, Gerald Posner, Doubleday, New York, 1994 (The New York Times Book Review, date of review and name of reviewer not noted). ]