There is a drug for paranoid schizophrenia!
One of the most amazing experiences of medical school was actually meeting schizophrenics. Reading about schizophrenia had not been enough to convince me that these people really had a special illness. After all, there seems to be enough variation in the behavior of people all around me to imagine that schizophrenia was someplace on the spectrum of how people respond to how they are raised or their environment.
I was wrong. When I met actual patients, I realized that schizophrenia is very, very real . The paranoids were especially memorable .not only were they worried about persecution ( many people, including members of my own family, have that problem) the paranoid schizophrenics have a strange lack of normal emotions and live in fantasies about a world very different than the reality I think I share with most other people.
Still, I wondered could there be schizophrenics who managed to passsociety by creating a world in which their fantasies became reality ? Could megalomaniacs like the Roman emperors in schizophrenics ? Was Napoleon living in his fantsy? Were Hitler and Stalin schizophrenics ? What about folks in today’s world? Are the Kochs so rich that they are able to create an environment this fits their fantasies ?
I knew one surgeon who, if I were in the business of diagnosing schizophrenia, I would have to term as schizophrenic . This fellow had become quite famous . He had many loyal patients who contributed to a charity designed to support the surgeon’s own research. The man was actually quite friendly! We went on a long walk together when he revealed himself to me. This physician his more than just casual relationship with Jesus. The relationship extended to personal conversations which I’m sure were every bit as real as the conversations I have with my own wife. I even heard, from clinical colleagues , that this surgeon had been known to go into fugue states between operations, a kind of trance from which he needed to be awakened. Despite all this, I was reassured by his clinical colleagues that the man was at least an adequate surgeon.
My guess is that the leaders of bizarre states … Bokar Haram in Nigeria, Kim Jung Un in North Korea, the Caliph of Iraq/Syria, and now the strange man calling himself the Prime Minister of Russian Ukraine suffer from this sort of paranoid schizophrenia . I suspect the same disease afflicts the more bizarre members of the Tea Party.
For that matter, the leaders of Hamas. What sort of fantasy world do they live in where they are willing to sacrifice so many lives to their need to drive Israel into the sea?
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