Originally Posted by Arrianna

Exactly. Schizophrenia was not diagnosed as a separate mental illness but lumped in with general madness. Once you know that you have to look at how the culture treated mad men.

In Early Roman times they considered many of them to be sent from the gods due to their Etruscan beginnings. The Romans had medicine but no doctors however so when they conquered Greece the Greek Dr's took over medicinal practice completely. The Greeks rejected the idea of a divine origin and placed it completely in the realm of the physical as imbalances or disturbances of some kind if not disease. Thanks to the Romans Grecian medicine spread completely throughout the "known world" Including to India. Once that occurred the belief of divine origin was never returned to though a demonic origin was believed for some time in medieval/early renaissance Europe.

In returning to the current major world religions we thus remove both Christianity and Islam from the list of possibility. Judaism believed that mental illness was actually a sign of problems between the person and God rather then a sign of favoritism. The founder of Buddhism was actually a physician and included in his teachings how to treat mental illnesses. I can't speak for Hinduism however, (perhaps someone else can fill that in), all I do know is that the Grecian medical views were embraced there and that having someone with mental illness in your family in predominantly Hindu countries is considered shameful.


In conclusion the belief of mental illness being a sign of divine favoritism can really only be traced in polytheist and animistic societies (as I mentioned earlier) and in all current main world religions there is no evidence of the same but rather the opposite. Hence without wittings that would support said mental illnesses or historical records of their actions that would imply the same it can reasonably be concluded that there is simply no evidence of schizophrenia as a cause for the founding of any of those religions.



So there. *laughs manically*