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715-705

715

        “At 10:55 am Dr. Minor came to the bottom gate, which was locked, and he called out: 'You had better send for the Medical Officer at once! I have injured myself!'"

       The words are the first lines of a brief penciled note that lurks anonymously among the scores of other papers that measure out the trivial details of the life of Broadmoor's patient number 742. Reports of the more mundane features of William Minor's now almost solitary life - his diet, his steadily diminishing number of visitors, his growing frailty, his curmudgeonly lapses, his insane ruminations - are usually made in ink, the writing steady and confident. But this single page, which is dated December 3, 1902, is very different. The fact that it was written in thick pencil sets it apart - but so does the handwriting, which makes it look as though it was scrawled urgently, in a hurry, by a man who was breathless, panicky, in a state of shock.

       Its author was the Block 2 principal attendant, a Mr. Coleman. He had good reason to be appalled:

       I sent Attendant Hartfield for the Medical Officer and went to see if I could assist Dr. Minor. Then he told me - he had cut his penis off. He said he had tied it with a string, which had stopped the bleeding. I saw what he had done.

       Dr. Baker and Dr. Noott then saw him and he was removed to the B-3 infirmary at 11:30am. [sic]

       He had taken his walk before breakfast as usual. Also he took his breakfast. I was talking to him at 9:50 in Ward 3, when he appeared to be just as usual.

       The PROFESSOR and the MADMAN, A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester, Harper Perennial, New York, 1999, pp. 189,190.

[See also New Quotations/Comments 714 and 701.]

       … He was a compulsive and obsessive masturbator. God would be certain to punish him dreadfully should he fail to halt his wholesale dependence upon self-abuse.

       His prodigious sexual appetites in particular started to become particularly abhorrent to him: He began to be haunted by the memory - or the fantastic supposed memory - of his past sexual conquests. He began to loathe the way his body responded, and with the way God had so inappropriately and unjustly equipped him. As his medical file reported:

       He believed there had been a complete saturation of his entire being with the lasciviousness of over 20 years, during which time he had relations with thousands of nude women, night after night. The nightly dissipations had had no perceptible influence on his physical strength, but his organ had increased in size as the result of such constant use, his constant priapism had allowed it to develop enormously. He remembers a Frenchwoman remarking "bien fait!" on first seeing it; another woman had called him "an apostle of pleasure"; sexual adventure and fantasy gave him as much pleasure as anything else in the world.

       But when he became Christianized he saw that he must sever himself from the lascivious life that he had been leading - and decided that the amputation of his penis would solve the problem.
(Ibid, p. 192)

       He was desperately certain that it was his penis that had led him to commit all the unsavory deeds that had so dominated his life. His continuing sexual desires, if not born in his penis, were at least carried out by it. In his delusional world he felt he had no alternative but to remove it. He was a doctor, of course, and so knew roughly what he was doing.

       So on that Wednesday morning he sharpened his knife on a whetstone. He tied a thin cord tightly around the base of his member to act as a ligature and to pressure-cauterize the blood vessels, he waited for ten minutes or so until the vein and artery walls had become properly compressed - and then, in one swift movement that most would prefer not to imagine, he sliced off his organ about one inch from its base.

       He threw the offending object into the fire. He relaxed the string and found that, as he had expected, there was almost no blood. He lay down for a while to ensure there was no hemorrhage and then walked almost casually to the lower gate on the ground floor of Block 2 and called for the attendant. His training taught him he would probably now go into shock, and he supposed that he needed to be put into the asylum infirmary - as indeed the astonished Broadmoor doctors ordered.
(Ibid, pp. 193,194)

       When author Simon Winchester says of Dr. Minor that "he began to loathe the way his body responded, and with the way that God had so inappropriately and unjustly equipped him," without realizing it he was describing the hidden psychological reasoning and motivation behind Dr. Minor's self-castration; for unconsciously the Doctor's greatest wish was to become a woman so he could have sexual relations with men and avoid being called that hated and feared word, a homosexual. The sexual equipment chosen for him by God - the despised penis - rendered that deepest and most repressed desire impossible of fulfillment. Thus in his schizophrenic, delusional state he attempted to rectify this frustrating sexual dilemma by destroying the penis which, at some deep psychological level, he intuitively recognized was the basic source of all his misfortunes and of his mental illness. In this regard his self-castration made perfect "rational" sense, just as it does today for any male transgendered person who wishes to submit to such gender-altering surgery in order to turn himself into, as far as physically possible, a full-fledged female.

       His obsessive, compulsive, pseudo-heterosexual masturbatory behavior over the years he spent in the asylum was his defense against his much more powerful and deeply repressed homosexual cravings, whose frustrated, thus ever-present sexual tension he was partially able to drain off by means of his constant masturbation to ostensibly heterosexual phantasies. When even this final avenue of escape from his fiercely insistent homosexual cravings failed him, he took the only course left to him which was to neuter himself by cutting off his offending penis. (It should be noted here that in every case of satyriasis in men and nymphomania in women, this same element is always at work, namely, a defense against repressed homosexual cravings.)

       Again to quote the profoundly intuitive words of the psychotic German Judge, Daniel Paul Schreber, the subject of Sigmund Freud's brilliant interpretive study and analysis of paranoia, "I would like to meet the man who, faced with the choice of either being a demented human being in male habitus, or a spirited woman, would not prefer the latter. Such and only such is the issue for me." (Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, p. 149, Wm. Dawson & Sons Ltd., London, 1955, translated from the German by Doctors Ida Mcalpine and Richard A. Hunter.)

       Schreber partially overcame his demented, paranoid state by becoming psychologically, and to some extent even physically, a female in order to fulfill God's wishes for him to do so. Fortunately, however, he never went so far as to castrate himself outright as did the totally deluded Dr. Minor, in the unforgiving grip of his "bearded lady" disease.

       Among schizophrenic males, cases of self-castration have occurred sporadically throughout recorded psychiatric history, always for the same reasons as illuminated above which drove Dr. Minor to perform his own.

714

        Except Dr. Minor, that is. Fiends have been creeping about in the interstices between floors and ceilings and have wrought mischief and committed crimes - not least in Broadmoor, where they hide and crawl out at night, to abuse the poor doctor nightly, mark his books, steal his flute, and torture him cruelly. The hospital, he says, must have solid floors built in: otherwise, no fire insurance, and a host of nightly misdeeds.

       The daily reports flow in a kind of seamless syrup of insanity. Four cakes stolen; his flute gone; his books all marked; he himself frog-marched up an down the corridor by Attendants James and Annett. A spare key used at night to allow villagers into his rooms to abuse him and his possessions. Doctor Minor, in his drawers and shirt, stockings and slippers, complaining that small pieces of wood were forced into his lock, that electricity was used on his body, that a "murderous lot" had beaten him during the night and left a savage pain all along his left side. Scoundrels came to his room. Attendant Coles came at 6 A.M. and "used my body" - "It is a very dirty business," he screamed one morning, standing now only is his drawers, "that a fellow cannot sleep without Coles coming in like that." Again as before: "He made a pimp of me!"
—THE PROFESSOR and the MADMAN, A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester, Harper Perennial, New York, 1999, p. 158 [See also New Quotation/Comment 701.]

       Although the men talked principally about words - most often about a specific word, but sometimes about more general lexical problems of dialect and the nuances of pronunciation - they did, it is certain, discuss in a general sense the nature of the doctor's illness. Murray could not help noticing, for instance, that Minor's cell floor had been covered with a sheet of zinc - "to prevent men from coming in through the timbers at night" - and that he kept a bowl of water beside the door of whichever room he was in - "because the evil spirits will not dare to cross the water to get to me."
—(Ibid, p. 179 above)

       It is very obvious that Doctor Minor's insanity is caused by his repressed homosexual longings and cravings, which ego-dystonic elements of his psyche he has long denied and consequently repressed into the depths of his unconscious mind, where, unfortunately, and as is invariably the case, they have consequently become powerful enough to unhinge his mind due to the toxic affect of their undischarged libidinal, or orgasmic, tensions.

       The "electricity" that Dr. Minor complains was "used on his body" is the direct result of his repressed homosexual phantasies which, due to their repression, have no other way to express themselves physiologically. The cure would be for him to masturbate to these phantasies to relieve the tremendous, pathology-causing orgasmic pressure which their damming-up has effected. (This "cure" would apply equally to insane women.)

713

        Ramírez somehow avoided deportation. But through an apparent misreading of letters from his family, he had already decided never to return to Mexico, believing that the Cristero Rebellion had irreparably divided his household when it consumed his property.
       In 1931, The San Joaquin County police arrested him for vagrancy. And believing him incoherent, perhaps because of their own inability to speak Spanish, they had him committed to Stockton State Hospital.
       After several incidents of escape and re-arrest, psychiatric authorities pronounced Ramírez incurably schizophrenic. His eventual transfer to DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn provided an environment stable enough to allow him to draw frequently, something he had begun to do in the margins of letters in the mid-'20.
       Confined for decades and isolated from fellow Spanish-speakers, Ramírez appears to have made a world on paper in which to roam and shelter. He used whatever materials he could scavenge until his keepers began to make them available. He continued to produce drawings until shortly before his death of pulmonary edema at DeWitt hospital in 1963. ... … Even a glance at the 90-odd drawings at the San Jose Museum registers the mysterious magnetism of Ramírez's work.
       Lines and structures repeat themselves relentlessly in his drawings, typically formimg hills or valleys when they curve, and when angular, room-like or stage-like enclosures. Ramírez seemed to draw these patterns with unwavering conviction. Through or within them, tracks and trains pass pistol-wielding horsemen - such as Ramírez himself had once been - or Madonna-like figures present themselves.
       Ramírez's images have provoked speculation as to their meaning since before the public first saw them. The exhibition contains an excellent survey of his art's critical reception, to which it adds fresh nuances.
—“An artist tragically confined still found freedom of expression” by Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic, San Francisco Chronicle, July 14, 2007, p. E1, E10.

       The key to Martin Ramírez's "bearded lady" conflict, the cause of his schizophrenic breakdown, can be found in the two themes which are constantly present in the great majority of his pictures - either that of the "pistol-wielding horsemen" or of the "Madonna-like figures." These two themes represent his basic bisexual conflict and gender confusion, the "pistol-wielding horsemen" standing for his active, masculine side and the "Madonna-like figures" standing for his passive, feminine side.
       On the cover of the newspaper article about Ramírez, on the left side of the page there is an old, faded, standing photograph of the artist, while on the right is a much larger standing drawing of one of his "Madonna-like" figures. This latter figure is drawn with thick, dark eyebrows and shows a startling resemblance to Ramírez's own facial portrait. Two tiny hands protrude from long sleeves and the fully-clothed figure has a markedly feminine "hour-glass" figure, with a very small waist.
       Even the casual observer of these two pictures could not help noticing a strong connection between them due to the facial similarities in the photograph of Ramírez and the one in his drawing. Basically in this latter figure he has drawn himself as the Madonna, as he has also done in countless other of his drawings during his artistic career. And it was directly due to this powerful, unconscious self-identification as an ultra-feminine "Madonna", clashing so violently with his conscious, masculine self-identification as a fierce, "pistol-wielding" horseman, that eventually caused him to succumb to the ravages of schizophrenia, the "bearded lady" disease, which is the invariable outcome in all such cases of severe, unconscious bisexual conflict and gender confusion.
       Lastly, the actual photo of Ramírez shows him to be a handsome man, but of very slight build and with noticeably small hands. These hands resonate strongly with the tiny hands he has drawn on the Madonna figure described above, adding further weight to the thesis that in the drawing he was in reality depicting his unconscious feminine self-image.

712

        "I found her sitting on the roof chanting at 4 a.m.," her husband [name and age deleted] said of that day about 25 years ago. "She was puffing away at four packs of cigarettes. She said her mountain gods had saved our son in a sort of bargain. I slapped her face to help her get her wits back.

        "Then her eyes blazed like those of a wild dog about to bite a man."...

... Korean Shamanism is rooted in ancient indigenous beliefs shared by many folk religions in northeast Asia. Most mudangs are women who say they discovered their ability to serve as a mediator between the human and spirit worlds after emerging from a critical illness. They believe that the air is thick with spirits, including those of dead relatives, a fox in the hills behind a village, an old tree or even a stove. These spirits interact with people and influence their fortunes....

... There are shamans who venerate Jesus, the Virgin Mary, even Park Chung-hee, the late South Korean military strongman. Under the pro-American military governments of the 1970s, there were shamans who took Gen. Douglas MacArthur as their deity. When MacArthur's spirit possessed them, they donned sunglasses, puffed on a pipe and uttered sounds that some clients took for English. —“Shamanism Enjoys Revival in Techno-Savvy South Korea,” by Choe Sang-hun, The New York Times, July 7, 2007.

        The woman whose husband found her sitting on the roof chanting in the early morning hours was obviously undergoing a paranoid schizophrenic psychosis. As is the case with all such "prophets" or founders of new "religions," the sudden discovery of their mystical, prophetic powers comes after their "emerging from a critical illness, " which is invariably a paranoid schizophrenic breakdown caused by severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion.

        In this particular incident, the wife's great underlying anger against her husband in particular, and undoubtedly against all men in general, is clearly demonstrated by the husband's description of her after he had "slapped her face to help her get her wits back," as having eyes that "blazed like those of a wild dog about to bite a man." Clearly this is not a portrayal of a normal, feminine-oriented woman or wife. Her long-repressed masculine feelings and instincts had finally broken through their repression in the unconscious and gained ascendancy and expression through her paranoid psychosis.

        It should be noted here that a psychosis is in reality nature's way of trying to facilitate the emergence of long-repressed, ego-dystonic and opposite-sex sexual and emotional feelings into the conscious awareness of the person undergoing the breakdown. Thereafter these ego-dystonic feelings may either be re-repressed (a social recovery without insight) or else worked through until they are no longer toxic to the individual (a social recovery with insight).

        "Prophets" fall into the first category of those individuals who quickly re-repress these ego-dystonic feelings and thereafter construct around them an elaborate and religiously-toned paranoid fantasy system which is then presented to the world as being either a uniquely new religion or else a different world-view of an already existing one.

        The invariable underlying "bearded lady" aspect of schizophrenia is here perfectly demonstrated by those shamans, predominantly female, who chose Gen. Douglas MacArthur "as their deity," and then "donned sunglasses, puffed on a pipe and uttered sounds that some clients took for English."

        This is clearly an outright example of transvestism being practiced by these particular female shamans. They had been "possessed" by an opposite-sex gender identification, which identification invariably "possesses" all such individuals who fall prey to schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease.

711

        Included was her favorite wedding portrait, in which she sits at the center of a pool of white satin. "My Cinderella dress spread out," she writes, "my husband kneeling on it as we share a kiss." Alexei was her first boyfriend.
       When they married in 1990, he was welcomed into the family. She calls the wedding joyous, with her father waving like the mayor as he walked down the aisle of the seaside Catholic church in their New Jersey hometown.
       After the honeymoon, they settled in Michigan, where Alexei, a fine artist, worked toward a graduate degree at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. She had been loath to leave her New York magazine job until her editors suggested that she could cover the book world in the Midwest. Everything appeared to be copacetic, but, all too soon, the marriage began to show strain. Kinsella was broadsided. "Alexei started spending more and more time at school," she writes. "He was pulling away from me." She didn't know why - or how to fix it.
       "The panic attacks to which he had always been prone came on more regularly," she writes.
       "So, we did what people do and sought counseling. After months in both couples' and individual therapy, Alexei was finally able to uncover a long-buried truth, which she details in the book. He had been molested as a child. With that dark nightmare exhumed, he then was able to acknowledge, and eventually accept, his homosexuality. —“Love Bloom Behind Bars,” by Heidi Benson, San Francisco Chronicle,        July 1, 2007, in her review of Bridget Kinsella's book, Visiting Life: Women Doing Time on the Outside, Copyright 2007, Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

       This marriage was obviously doomed from the start due to the groom's long-standing but deeply repressed homosexual nature. His denied and frustrated homo-erotic energy had found its disguised outlet in the so-called panic attacks to which he "had always been prone," and whose source, or trigger, was finally uncovered thanks to the intensive psychotherapy which he had undertaken.
       The repressed homosexual basis for these "panic attacks," which usually occur at inopportune times and are seemingly unrelated to any current events in the afflicted person's life, has long been understood and consequently such attacks are routinely designated as "homosexual panic attacks" in Freudian psycho-analytic literature and teachings.
       This factor of repressed homosexuality, deeply buried in the psyche of the bride or of the groom, and oftentimes of both, is a constant and important factor in the deterioration and termination of the great majority of such marriages, if not of all marriages.

710

       The psychotherapy of neuroses and psychoses is practically differentiated into two important steps, as experience has shown. The first step is best begun with the impressive sympathetic advantages of the first interview.

       Without taking a routine case history or making notes at the time, well-directed analytic- suggestive questioning is begun with the precise purpose of inducing the patient into adopting a less fearful, more relaxed attitude toward his sexual cravings, whatever they are and no matter how strong and repetitious they are, and talking about them freely. The patient has generally convinced himself that he is the only one of his kind as the result of the superior moral pretensions of his elders having been especially aimed at him. As he realizes that his attitude toward his sexual cravings and methods of trying to manage them, and not the cravings as such, have produced his illness, he improves decisively and his capacity for working and thinking becomes adequate for the needs of everyday life.

       The second step is more involved and requires the inductive analytic conversion of the conditioned erotic and other emotional cravings to heterosexuality whenever possible. The former step is usually well started in an hour or two of confidential, sympathetic, understanding talk with the patient if the physician is not preoccupied with thinking in terms of neurology and toxicology.

       Psychological miracles often follow as the sexual fight becomes reduced. I am sure that literally thousands of autoerotic young men and women and children in our institutions and outside, who must otherwise remain incurable psychopaths, will be helped to readjust to a healthy personal integrity when psychiatrists adopt this method. The analytic readjustment to heterosexuality requires more time but generally it can be carried on outside of the hospital in private practice. It requires the recall and reliving of every decisive episode that tended to produce a repetitious emotional displacement until a normal readjustment follows without striving.

—“Bisexual Factors in Curable Schizophrenia*,” by Edward J. Kempf, M.D., pp. 418-419, Short Articles and Notes, Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology, Vol. 44, 1949, pp. 414-419, (*Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, May 18, 1948.)

       In the above quotation Dr. Kempf brilliantly and deftly lays bare for the reader the repressed bi-sexualilty basis of all functional mental illness and then follows that up with clear instructions outlining the method of de-repression which will "cure" it.

       It can be stated without any exaggeration or qualification that the above two paragraphs so profoundly and insightfully penned by Dr. Kempf are the two most important ones ever written in the fields of psychology and psychiatry, for very simply they illuminate, in clear, understandable terms, first the etiology of mental illness and secondly, its only cure.

       Psychotropic drugs can sedate and tranquillize, but the psycho-analytic method described above by Dr. Kemp is the only one which can restore the mentally ill individual to full psychological health and general well-being. Unfortunately this curative process requires much time and great effort on the parts of both analyst and patient, but the rewards are far-reaching and irreversible.

       "Psychological miracles" indeed.

709

       Every human, like the lower primates and other mammals, is a plastic, bisexual mechanism in which every cell, organ, and the organism as a whole and all of its behavior are bisexually differentiated in more or less male and female ratios by chromosomal, gonadal, and socially conditioning factors. Therefore social and other environmental successes and failures have more or less masculinizing or feminizing reactive effects upon the social-sexual attitude. Every person's ontogeny recapitulates its phylogeny and begins with hermaphroditic, self-loving, polyorificial (oral, anal, and genital) autoerotism. It passes through phases of autoerotic development up to late adolescence, attended with more or less homosexual infatuation and experimentation, and eventually matures by conversion of affection toward heterosexualism and reproduction.

—“Bisexual Factors in Curable Schizophrenia*,” Edward J. Kempf, M.D., Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology, Vol 44, 1949, p.417.

       What Dr. Kempf is describing here is the perfect outcome of the natural mammalian sexual growth process - mankind, of course, included - which begins at birth and culminates in the potent heterosexuality which enables a species to procreate its own kind and thus ensure its evolutionary survival.
       Only in man, however, can these natural stages of development go awry due to his uniquely over-developed intellect which alone, among all other mammals, possesses the strength and the motivation to enable it to repress feared or otherwise unwanted sexual urges. When this happens, the natural processes of sexual development delineated by Dr. Kempf above become derailed and the mature heterosexual goal is relinquished.
       Simultaneously with this relinquishment the powerful sexual urges veer off into a less mature homosexual state, and if this homosexual state itself is then further repressed, the first myriad, malignant symptoms of mental illness will invariably begin to make their appearance. Since man alone has the intellectual power to derail this natural chain of mammalian sexual growth stages, consequently only he has the potential to fall prey to the development of devastating schizophrenic madness - and obviously very greatly to his detriment.

708
(A)

       You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience.

       You thought it was one pathetic boy's life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people...... Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your vodka and cognac wasn't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything...... I didn't have to do it. I could have fled. But now I am no longer running. If not for me, for my children and my brothers and sisters that you [expletive]. I did it for them...... You just loved to crucify me. You loved inducing cancer in my head, terror in my heart and ripping my soul all this time...... You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today. But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off.

       
- Excerpts from the video which Cho Seung-Hui, 23, the Virginia Tech "shooter" who killed 33 people, including himself, while wounding many more, sent to NBC News on Monday morning, April 16, 2007, the day of the massacre.

(B)

       There is this condiscending [sic] attitude in business that when you get emotionally and mentally raped, well 'you got screwed' and the accepted results is that the victim is now supposed to go to work at 7-11 or become homeless and the rapist is admired and envied as a 'winner.' I have always admired and tried to copy winners, but rape of any kind is deplorable and against the law. Remember the time when the same sneakering [sic], laughing attitude was bestowed upon drunk drivers, and the victim got no sympathy? Remember the time when the person raped physically did not dare to report it because of the humiliation and redicule [sic] that the legal system put the [victim] thru... When you hire a consultant or an attorney you don't hire for the purpose of getting raped and then having all your efforts towards legal recourse totally thwarted by a corrupt legal system of 'esquires.' Esquires in the dark ages romed [sic] the countryside to steel [sic] from the working people and give to the prince. Do attorney [sic] want us to call them esquires because their allegiance is to the monarchy?

       
- "Excerpts from Gunman's Letter," Gianluigi Ferri, San Francisco Chronicle, July 3, l993, p. A-12. See also Quotation 569, pp. 427-428, in Schizophrenia - The Bearded Lady Disease, by J. Michael Mahoney, AuthorHouse, Bloomington, IN, 2003, 2006. [Gianluigi Ferri went on a murderous rampage in a law office in San Francisco in early July, 1993, killing eight people, including himself, and wounding six.]

       Note how both "shooters" in quotations (A) and (B) above have unconsciously identified themselves as females being raped, the direct result of their severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion. It was this pathological psychic state which triggered in each of them the paranoid schizophrenic ideation and actions leading to such horrific results, as it invariably does in all such cases of persons "running amok", or "going postal", as this condition is now often described in popular American parlance.

       In a Special Report in Newsweek magazine of April 30, 2007, the package of material Cho Seung-Hui mailed to NBC was said to have "included a rancid manifesto in which Cho casts himself as a kind of avenging angel against the 'Christian Criminals' who have raped and sodomized, humiliated and crucified him and others he describes as the 'Weak and Defenseless.'" Cho's words strikingly highlight his overwhelmingly powerful, passive feminine homosexual desires which he, in typical paranoid fashion, has projected onto the outer world as being forced upon him against his will, i.e., his being raped and sodomized. This same paranoid ideation can be seen in Gianluigi Ferri's oft-repeated complaints about being "raped" and "screwed" by the powerful male figures in his environment. This ideation vividly illustrates the fact that both men's deepest and most fiercely repressed sexual desires were to play the passive, feminine sexual role in homosexual anal sex. As Sigmund Freud said, What man represses at his deepest level are his passive, pederastic instincts. When these ego-dystonic instincts become too intense, due to the psychological warping which occurs in the life of the child, the outcome in adulthood may be either the partaking in an active, conscious homosexual lifestyle or else attempted escape from such feelings into a state of complete denial and repression of them. In this latter case the outcome is always malignant, resulting in severe mental illness, most typically of the paranoid schizophrenic type which engulfed both Gianluigi Ferri and Cho Seung-Hui, with shockingly disastrous consequences both to them and to their immediate environs.

       As further noted in the Newsweek Special Report, Cho Seung-Hui wrote a play in 2006 describing how a 13-year-old boy fights off the homosexual advances of an older man by trying to ram a "breakfast bar down his throat", but is then killed by the older man with a "deadly blow." Trying to ram something down someone's throat in this homosexual context seems to point specifically to oral sex, perhaps another of Cho's deeply repressed sexual desires, along with his wish to be "raped and sodomized", as mentioned earlier. Of course he attributes his paranoid delusion of being "raped and sodomized" to the hostile actions of others rather than to his own deepest unconscious longings.

       Cho attempted desperately towards the end of his life to prove that he was a virile man when in actuality he was an extremely effeminate "mama's boy."

       In an intuitive remark by one of Cho's roommates at Virginia Tech, Andy Koch, Cho was described as riding a stationary bike in a gym "like a 70-yea-old woman."

       In conclusion, Both Gianluigi Ferri and Cho Seung-Hui are classic examples of persons suffering from the malignant effects of paranoid schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease, invariably triggered by severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion. And when this long-repressed conflict finally becomes so powerful that it can no longer be contained by the conscious, rational mind, irrationality, or "craziness" takes over and the victim sinks into the pit of what is called, in psycho-analytic teaching, a "homosexual panic." And it is always at this juncture that the final psychotic break occurs and the afflicted person runs amok, lashing out indiscriminately at all around him or her.
The saying "I would rather die than admit it" pertains extraordinarily well to Gianluigi Ferri, Cho Seung-Hui and every other madman who finally snaps from the unbearable pressure of his or her long-repressed homosexuality and goes on a rampage, usually resulting in tragic collateral damage to many innocent bystanders, as well as to themselves. In short, they did "die rather than admit it."

707

       "Fig. 1: Drawing made by a female hebephrenic patient.

       Athletic women have masculine physical traits." [Source not noted.]

       "Anonymous painting from Japan of a woman struggling in waves." Source: Centre Hospitalier Saint-Anne/Jeu de Pomme

       An opening in the lower part of her skirt reveals two muscular, masculine-looking calves while her shoulders are broad and powerful-looking.

       The face has been drawn with a severe expression on it. Her hair is parted in the middle, flaring out rigidly on each side at eye-level. Her breasts are drawn smallish and insignificant-looking. The overall impression of this figure is that of a woman who is a fierce, disciplined athlete, with a personality to match. There is a marked lack of femininity in the drawing.

       Surrounding this central figure are smaller drawings of other women, some of whom are playing basketball and tennis, while others are engaged in aquatic diving and ballet dancing. All these supporting figures have also been drawn to emphasize the same masculine physiques and traits as personified in the drawing of the central figure. Even the skirted ballet dancers have wide, manly shoulders. As the heading under this drawing states, "Athletic women have masculine physical traits."

       In the anonymous painting (Picture B) from Japan of a woman struggling fiercely amid raging blue-colored ocean waves, painted by a schizophrenic Japanese artist, what is most visible is a tangle of long dark hair being grasped tightly in the woman's right hand while the left hand is also grasping some loose ends of the hair. The contours of the face are very indistinct and it is glaringly obvious that the woman in the painting is engaged in a life-and-death struggle to keep from drowning.

       The most arresting part of the picture, however, is the shape of the hands and arms of the swimmer. They are large, muscular and powerful-looking and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to tell from the painting whether it is depicting a woman rather than a man were it not for two round breasts partially hidden by some strands of long dark hair. Thus on first sight the viewer is immediately confused by what sex the swimmer is - part of the figure appears feminine, i.e., the long dark hair and the breasts, but the rest of the picture gives the distinct impression of powerful masculine forces in action due to its striking presentation of the well-muscled hands and arms.

       Once again, in two separate cases of schizophrenia, the underlying factor of severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion which is invariably the basic etiological factor operative in every case of the illness, is vividly illustrated here through the medium of the schizophrenic patients' artwork.

       One of the artists (Picture A) is female while the sex of the other (Picture B) has not been indicated. But in reality their designated sex is unimportant since it is their underlying gender confusion as to which sex they belong to which has been the crucial factor in instigating their schizophrenic illness in the first place. This basic etiological factor is constant in every case of schizophrenia, as indeed it is in all cases of functional mental illness, regardless of the profusion of differently-named labels that are arbitrarily applied to its multitude of variegated symptoms.

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       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, Ph.D., 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 The Psychiatric Study of Jesus - Exposition and Criticism. by Albert Schweitzer, The Beacon Press, Boston, 1948, pp. 11-13.

        Notwithstanding the tendentious and ill-informed attempt by Dr. Schweitzer to argue in his Ph.D. thesis that the historical personage named "Jesus" did not suffer from any mental illness, the general, unbiased consensus of his contemporary diagnosticians was almost unanimous in agreeing that he was afflicted with paranoia (now called paranoid schizophrenia). It took the brilliant analytic genius of Sigmund Freud to uncover the hidden mechanisms of this disease and to prove to the world that it was "invariably" caused by the repression and denial of homosexual passions, mixed equally with severe gender confusion. [Viz., the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, published in 1900.]

       The fact that Jesus suffered from schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease, puts into perspective the strong homosexual tinge which has always followed his teachings wherever they have led. For example, It is most interesting to observe how the following words, licentious, lustful, lubricious, lewd, lascivious, lecherous and wanton, all have a very negative connotation in present-day parlance and dictionary definition. Of course all these words originally referred to powerful heterosexual passions, and yet all are given "sinful" interpretations which are taught to "Christian" youth from the very earliest years. Small wonder then that with the force of this great negative emphasis placed upon what are really the most natural, healthy and "lustful" of heterosexual impulses, so many young people today are forced into struggling mightily with their sexual identity. If these natural heterosexual desires and tendencies are denigrated and despised from a child's earliest years onward, what other path is left for these powerful sexual feelings to take? The answer to that question appears to be strikingly self-evident. If not heterosexuality, what?

       The fact that this country is now an "insanely religious" one, in the biting words of Professor Harold Bloom of Yale University, and that the exact same charge can be leveled against many other present-day countries and societies, does not bode well for the future of the world. Schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease, is the common enemy of all mankind.

       According to historical records, Jesus' parents knew he was insane and tried their best to steer him away from his self-destructive and delusional messianic mission, but of course to no avail. The same situation applies to many, if not all, of the founders of the world's other major "religions." Their contemporaries may have realized that these early "prophets" were likewise insane, but they were nevertheless similarly powerless to stop them from their delusional and consequently too-often destructive missions, to the detriment once more of all mankind.

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       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 every 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 an 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

        The person who wrote the above article has correctly intuited the truth in the supposition that the great majority of the early founders of the Judeo-Christian tradition was stark, raving mad, or suffering from what today would be designated clinically as "paranoid schizophrenia." The usual method for handling these severely mentally ill persons presently would consist in the administration of powerful, sedating psychotropic drugs, and/or their commitment to the nearest mental institution. It must be admitted, however, that there are currently many severely mentally disturbed "preachers" still plying their "holy" trade with relative impunity.

       When the author of the above quotation asks in the final paragraph, "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" It certainly does make one think, or it should, and in Quotation 706 the thoughts and conclusions of some early investigators/researchers who did "think" about it very seriously will be presented.

       It is strikingly evident from the above quotation that schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease, has bedeviled mankind for as long as he has been recording his own history, and undoubtedly for far longer than even that.