About one percent of the world’s population suffers from such severe chronic mental illness as schizophrenia. This type of mental disorder worries the patient throughout his life and has a significant impact on his life. Translated from Greek, schizophrenia means “to split the soul”, it was so named by the Swiss psychiatrist E. Bleuler in 1891, earlier it was called “premature dementia”.
Some mistakenly equate schizophrenia with bipolar affective disorder (BAD) and epilepsy, but with some similarities, these are different diseases. This disease does not have a split personality. This is some other, not so common disease. People suffering from schizophrenia experience rather a splitting of the mind and immersion in another reality.
Schizophrenia affects equally men and women, more often residents of cities than villages and villages, which is primarily due to the availability of psychiatric care and cultural differences.
Most often, the disease manifests itself between the ages of 15 and 35, in half of the cases it begins before the age of 25 and much less often after 40 years. Scientists believe that schizophrenia is caused by an imbalance of chemicals that, when released into the brain, cause a false perception of reality. The mechanism and causes of this imbalance are not fully understood.
Today, more than 27 million people suffering from schizophrenia live in the world, about 30 thousand patients die from concomitant ailments associated with it.
«Genius Disease»
For the vast majority of people, the word «schizophrenia» is associated with terrible scenes of psychosis in patients suffering from this serious illness. However, not everyone knows that many famous people suffered from this severe chronic disease. There is an opinion that the border between madness and genius is illusory.
Van Gogh, Gogol Newton, Nietzsche, Scriabin, Hemingway and many other legendary figures whose names were associated with this disease became famous for their great discoveries, the creation of magnificent works of art, deep and non-standard ideas. Is there really a link between genius and insanity? The researchers note that the work of some parts of the brain in schizophrenics and normal people has certain differences. Psychologists, in turn, argue that the thinking of a schizophrenic is limitless and unpredictable against the background of the standard stereotypical thinking of an ordinary healthy person.
Mysticism and schizophrenia
The altered states of consciousness of schizophrenic sufferers and transpersonal experiences of various mystical cults, from the Dionysian bacchanalia to Haitian voodooism, being in different conceptual realms, have a common relation to hallucinogenic states and fantasy experiences..
Psychiatrists note that many patients strive for an altered state of consciousness, suffering from attitudes similar to the preparatory steps of mystics seeking to enter a special state of consciousness. At the same time, mystical literature calls for distinguishing genuine mystical states consisting in experience of inexpressible, boundless semantic unity with the Absolute from ecstasy, hallucinations, euphoria, delusional ideas and hypnotic trances.
The similarity is manifested in the change of phases of the mental state and in acute mystical episodes and in psychosis — confusion, gives way to anxiety and then turns into revelation.