Faith, Schizophrenia, and the Meaning of “Symptoms”
I remember telling my friend Paul, although he misunderstood me, “Paul, I’ve been diagnosed with schizophrenia,” and he said, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I don’t know much about schizophrenia, all I know is that you’ve got two personalities.” I said, “Oh no! It’s not like that!” So I explained to him what it was and how I felt. He’s always been very keen to help me. That’s the kind of friends you need, isn’t it? (smiles)
KATHLEEN COLDIRON BEGINS HER REVIEW OF ESMÉ WEIJUN WANG’S autobiographical collection of essays The Collected Schizophrenias with a powerful observation:
If there exists a mental-illness diagnosis as scary as the physical-illness diagnosis of cancer, schizophrenia may be it. To the general public, it’s a monolith of a condition: the one where you hear voices in your head and talk to people who aren’t there. That Beautiful Mind guy had it, and he invented Ed Harris completely, remember? But the words and stories of those who live with schizoaffective disorder offer proof that it’s a spectrum illness, which manifests with great variety and defies stereotype. And though it’s a serious diagnosis, many of those afflicted insist that they are not doomed.1
Coldiron highlights the easily overlooked fact that schizophrenia is not a monolithic entity and that people experience it in quite different ways. Most important, she highlights that it is not a death sentence. People can and do live well with it, and some do recover. Schizophrenia is not like cancer or measles. It is a medical construct designed to make sense of a series of lived experiences that have become troublesome either to an individual or to those around her. However, it is a very broad and indistinct category.
In developing this point, Coldiron contrasts three autobiographical accounts of people living with schizophrenia: The Quiet Room: A Journey out of the Torment of Madness, by Lori Schiller and Amanda Bennett; The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness, by Elyn R. Saks; and Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias.2 Each account is markedly different. Schiller hears horrible voices that shout at her relentlessly. Her experiences make her life totally miserable, even to the point where she tries to take her own life. She also suffers from certain forms of treatment (overmedication) and from unnecessary electric convulsive therapy, which is cruel and inhumane. Saks’s book talks of extraordinary willpower wherein she hid profound symptoms and channeled her energies into becoming outstanding in academic pursuits in the legal and medical fields. Esmé Weijun Wang’s experience is quite different, as it progresses, recovers, and regresses in ways that are deeply disturbing but at times spiritually revealing: “Wang’s voices aren’t much like Schiller’s, and her delusional convictions (for example, that she is dead—also known as the Cotard delusion) are much more unusual. Saks is paranoid and manic while Wang leans to catatonia. Wang’s book is less alarming than the other two, in part because her voice is so measured and intelligent. The fact is, the three women have different illnesses, even though their umbrella diagnosis is the same—schizoaffective disorder varies as much as its patients do.”3 All three live under the description of schizophrenia, but they all have quite different experiences, so much so that Coldiron surmises that they may actually have three different conditions.
Historically, the precise nature and boundaries of schizophrenia have always been unclear. In her excellent book Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness, historian Anne Harrington describes the situation as “diagnostic chaos.”4 She observes that while schizophrenia has tended to be perceived as a poster-child disorder for those who accept the biological explanation of mental health challenges, the evidence for its existence as a biological entity, and indeed the evidence for its existence at all, has always been controversial, fragmented, and constantly changing. What is true historically remains the case today:
At a conference in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1990, and titled “What Is Schizophrenia?,” the first speaker paused at the podium to ask for the next slide. It would, he said, show a list of “established facts” about the disorder. The screen then went blank, prompting wry laughter to ripple through the auditorium. A full generation after that, there was a lot more research, a lot more data, many more claims, but no more certainty. In 2008 a group of researchers launched a multipart project designed to identify and critically assess all “facts” currently established for schizophrenia. They identified seventy-seven candidate facts. Each was graded on a 0–3 scale for reproducibility, relevance for understanding schizophrenia, and durability over time. Some turned out to be more robust than others, but none got full marks. More important, even the most robust individual facts pointed in a range of different directions; they did not, as a group, lead logically to any coherent explanation of schizophrenia. As these researchers reflected in 2011, the field seemed to be operating “like the fabled six blind Indian men groping different parts of an elephant coming up with different conclusions.” In fact, they admitted, in the current state of knowledge, one could not rule out another possibility: “there may be no elephant, more than one elephant, or many different animals in the room.”5
For some, such as the neuropsychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones, the controversies that surround this diagnosis spell the end of schizophrenia as a meaningful concept: “Arguments that schizophrenia is a distinct disease have been ‘fatally undermined.’ Just as we now have the concept of autism spectrum disorder, psychosis (typically characterised by distressing hallucinations, delusions, and confused thoughts) is also argued to exist along a continuum and in degrees. Schizophrenia is the severe end of a spectrum or continuum of experiences.”6
So acute is this issue that in Japan psychiatrists recently renamed schizophrenia “integration disorder.”7 Since the name change, the number of people recognizing that they have the condition has increased. People with “integration disorder” are more likely to consent to or even seek treatment than those with the more stigmatized diagnosis of schizophrenia.8 Elsewhere, there is a growing push to think of schizophrenia in a way similar to autism, as a “psychosis spectrum disorder.” These moves have partly to do with the malignant social psychology that accompanies the diagnosis of schizophrenia, to which we will return later, and partly to do with the lack of available evidence to convince people that we are dealing with a monolithic entity.9 The issue is not helped by what the philosopher Jonathan Glover has described as the problem of wandering diagnoses: “the problem of ‘wandering diagnosis’ [reflects the fact that] symptoms can change in ways that suggest that one disorder is morphing into another and perhaps back again. ‘It did look like bipolar disorder at first, but now it looks more like schizophrenia. Perhaps it is schizoaffective disorder. We will see more clearly as it runs its course.’ Wandering diagnosis raises questions about the distinctness and usefulness of the diagnostic categories.”10
And so, someone like Alice, whom we shall meet more fully later in the book, has had a challenging journey in her movement toward schizophrenia:
I kind of got diagnosed with everything. I mean my last major diagnosis was early onset schizophrenia, but I had been through bipolar, I had been through borderline personality disorder, I had been through manic depression. I had run the whole gamut really, because no one understood what was going on with me, partly I think because a lot of it was also related to what was going on at home, so it was kind of hard to separate the threads out of what was abuse and what was mental health. So, kind of the last diagnosis I got was early onset schizophrenia. They still say I have PTSD and anxiety issues and things like that but, you know. (laughs) So that’s kind of … I mean I’ve done everything. It’s really funny actually, watching movies and they’re like, “he’s crazy and he’s on all this medication,” and I’m like, oh I’ve been on that. (laughs) I know that medication! So yeah … (giggles).
To be clear, the issue is not the reality or validity of people’s experiences. The problem is the parameters of the diagnosis, the lack of supporting evidence for a monolithic entity, and the negative social persona that the diagnosis of schizophrenia has drawn to itself.
I raise these critical issues at the beginning of our discussion of schizophrenia for three main reasons: First, to enable readers to see and understand that when we talk about “schizophrenia,” we are talking about a wide range of experiences that do not necessarily or naturally fit together. Schizophrenia is not like those forms of physical illness that have clear causes, uniform manifestations, and fixed verifiable forms of treatment. People living under this description may share features, but there is a variability and a malleability that is important to keep in mind as we reflect on their experiences.
Second, the diversity of experiences draws attention to the varied and deeply personal ways in which those who live under the general description of schizophrenia experience the world. Some people are haunted by horrible voices and are tortured by paranoia and unhelpful delusions. Others live well with their voices and visions and have no desire to have them taken away. Some people cycle from depression to elation (so-called schizoaffective states); others remain emotionally neutral, and the emotions of still others become flattened. Some become cognitively disoriented; others do not.
Recognition of this diversity helps us think slightly differently about schizophrenia. Schizophrenia seems to be a continuum of experiences rather than a single thing. We will learn relatively little by focusing on the general category of schizophrenia. A more fruitful approach will be to develop a more nuanced understanding of the various experiences that make up the category. Jonathan Glover draws out the importance of this point: “Particular symptoms are more fine-grained than diagnostic categories—‘having delusions’ rather than ‘schizophrenic.’ Some symptoms are more fine-grained than others—‘hearing voices’ rather than ‘having delusions.’ Knowing what the voices say is more fine-grained still. And obviously some narratives are more fine-grained than others. ‘Violent and emotionally labile’ is less informative than ‘He was emotionally warm arriving at his mother’s house, saying how much his old room meant to him, and telling her about his new job, but only an hour later he was crying and he killed her cat.’”11 In this way, we can assess the variety of basic experiences that constitute the category “schizophrenia” in a way that helps us get into the personal as well as the biological dimensions of people’s experiences—the lived body as well as the material body. The lived body—the body as it encounters and engages with the world—is the realm of the spiritual and, as such, vital for current purposes.12
Participation in that continuum is not confined to those people whose apparently unconventional experiences bring them into contact with professional mental health care. Many people without a diagnosis of schizophrenia encounter the kinds of things that people living under the description experience. This is particularly so in relation to hearing voices, which we will explore in some detail in the next chapter. It’s not that we are “all a bit schizophrenic”; it’s that none of us is “schizophrenic.” The category is too fragile and fluid to be a sufficient mark of identity. The experiences that come under the general banner of schizophrenia are much less “other” than many of us might assume.
Third, schizophrenia has become a highly stigmatized diagnosis. In the United States and elsewhere, people are often portrayed as having a “hopeless brain disease that is worse than cancer.” However, as McCarthy-Jones correctly points out, “this view of schizophrenia is only possible by excluding people who live well with their schizophrenia and those who have positive outcomes.”13 The problem is that the negative persona of schizophrenia can become an ideology, that is, a doctrine that defines the condition and within which transgression from the doctrine can mean exclusion from the conversation. Some who recover from schizophrenia are effectively told that “it mustn’t have been schizophrenia after all.”14 For schizophrenia to be a truly hopeless condition, recovery and hope must be removed from the criteria. As McCarthy-Jones points out, recovery properly framed and understood is in fact possible at a number of levels.15
In the following chapters, I will use the term “schizophrenia” as a holding category for a number of experiences that require clarification and exploration, not necessarily as part of a monolithic diagnosis but as important and meaningful (if sometimes deeply distressing) personal experiences that must be understood and responded to in particular rather than general ways. In what follows, I begin by presenting an overview of the general parameters of psychotic experience by exploring what it feels like to live with schizophrenia. I will focus on the impact of these experiences on people’s faith lives. In the following chapter, I will pick up on Glover’s suggestion regarding the importance of more nuanced understandings by focusing on the experience of hearing voices. Chapter 8 will burrow down even further and explore the importance of the meaning of voices for a nuanced understanding of what people are going through and what might help as we accompany them on their journey. In chapter 9, I will do something similar with the issue of delusions, something that is shared by those living under the description of bipolar disorder.
“Psychosis” is a broad term that incorporates a variety of experiences that run across diagnoses. People with schizophrenia and people with bipolar disorder can experience psychoses, as can those living with major depression, fevers, infections, and so forth. Our primary focus here will be on people living under the description of schizophrenia, but it is important to note the diverse and shared nature of psychotic experience. Broadly speaking, the types of experiences of people living under the description of psychosis in general, and schizophrenia in particular, are as follows:
Some people live with all or most of these experiences for long periods of time. Others have some of these experiences, some of the time. Others have some or all of them for a relatively short period of time and never experience them again. Whatever the duration, each of these experiences has both clinical and spiritual significance. It will be helpful to expand a little on some of these experiences and to draw out some of their spiritual implications.
This phenomenon entails hearing a voice, either internally or externally, that is not heard by others. It is often associated with people with psychotic disorders and is often perceived as paradigmatic of schizophrenia and as a primary mark of “madness.” Yet voice hearing is actually a relatively common occurrence. Brent’s voices started when he was in his early twenties. He was two years into his university course focusing on English and philosophy when suddenly his world turned upside down: “There was one particular night when I woke up in the middle of the night and I could hear voices inside my head. Just a weird chatter to begin with and then louder, louder voices that really had a go at me! They told me I am wicked and not worth spending time with. It was quite a shock really!” Brent’s voices were terrifying, grinding, commanding, controlling:
They tell you to do things. So, sometimes I would be walking down the road and they would shout, “STOP!” So, I’d have to stop and stand there until they said, “GO!” So, I have to stand there, sometimes for ages. It’s really embarrassing…. Or they tell me to go to a place and tell people things, sometimes good things (or so I think) but often not such good things. But mostly the voices just tell me that I’m rubbish. I can resist them, but sometimes I get so tired that I think, “Oh well. I will just do what they say.”
Brent felt baffled, bewildered, and helpless, but above all, he felt afraid. The grinding criticism and the incessant calls to kill himself were terrifying and especially draining. Though he was exhausted, he oftentimes could get no sleep.
Sometimes his voices morphed into spiritual beings.
There was one night, I thought a demon appeared to me in my room. I could see it, and I was scared. So, I phoned up my mum, and she said: “You phone up Dr. Shervington, and see if you can get an appointment.” So, I phoned him up, and he said, “Yes, come in right away!” So, I went and told him, and he came up and saw me. He kept me in hospital, and then he saw me something like once a week for a couple of months. I was put on medication, but the tablets he gave me, I can’t remember what kind, made me very stiff. So, I found it difficult to get up the stairs. I needed to hold on to the hand rail, sort of pull myself because my legs were so stiff. They managed to sort that out, but things just got worse! I was convinced that this demon was going to kill me.
Once he even heard the voice of God:
And I’ve only heard this once, but it was October last year: I thought I heard the voice of God speaking inside my head. And he was telling me to do things. So, I went out and did them right away because I said to myself, well, you can’t say to God, “you’ve got to wait,” or something like that, you know? If God says to do something, you’ve got to do it! And be pleased about it! The voice spoke with God’s authority, and he said who he was, and it was just like, oh, that’s good, God spoke to me! I was very pleased. That was good. I felt special. I could hear God’s voice telling me that I was the Messiah, and things like that.
At other times, God’s presence was darker: “I was saying to myself, oh, you’re not a good person, are you? No, you’re going to hell when you die. And all this. And I just felt like God had done this to punish me for this terrible life I lived.” And yet, in the midst of this cacophony of horrible voices, other things were going on:
Well, sometimes it was really obvious, sometimes I would be like lying in bed with my hands over my ears, just screaming for stuff to shut up and go away. And then I would just be at my wits’ end, basically, and I would be going, “God, you need to help me, you need to help me, I need to sleep.” And it would just be, just this hush, and this kind of “I’ve got you,” you know? That didn’t happen often, but every now and then, and in those moments, I knew he still remembered me. My life seemed like the surface of the sea in the storm, but God was the undercurrent that was peaceful.
In the midst of such storms, Brent sometimes finds something to remind him that God remembers him. It’s fleeting, but the memory is important. When he feels as if he is drowning, he can hold on to those moments as possibilities for hope.
But there was something else going on. Something dissonant but intriguing. Voices can be horrible, but they can also be supportive:
But it’s funny, people ask me, “Do you hear voices?” assuming it is a bad thing. It is! And it’s scary. But it’s not as straightforward as that. I began to hear a nasty voice, but I also heard a nice voice. I still do. The nice voice I don’t mind, because it says nice things; it sticks up for me against the nasty voice. The nasty voice is just like … well … nonstop criticism. Day and night, it tells me how bad I am; it tells me to kill myself, and things like that. I could hear them inside my head arguing, one telling me I’m good, the other that I am really terrible.
In the midst of this barrage of negativity, Brent found an ally: a welcoming voice that was supportive, caring, and kind; a friendly voice that gave him hope. He lived in a strange tension between voices that taunted him and voices that encouraged him. We will return to this strange and unsettling ambiguity that sits at the center of voice hearing.
Having beliefs that others do not share has important implications for Christians living with psychosis. Jane articulates her experience in this way:
So, I think one of the very strange things going through it [an acute psychotic experience], as a Christian, was that the delusions that I was experiencing were very much rooted in quite spiritual things. My thoughts were very concentrated on God and the Bible, and what was happening prophetically was, you know all of that, in a very distortive way. I constantly thought I was getting messages from God, which was troubling and tiring. So, because I didn’t know I was unwell, I didn’t have insight and was believing that it was all real; it was very, very strange. I was walking through these thoughts and thinking God was going to send me to hell, and thinking all sorts of strange things, like that God was telling me to do certain things to win his approval. I definitely felt special. I reckon God was indeed with me, but something in that experience was distorted. I do think God was in that, but I couldn’t work it out until I felt better.
The idea of feeling special was encouraging and, in principle, life enhancing, but there was a shadow side to Jane’s feelings of specialness:
And, on top of that, there was such a strong theme of self-sacrifice throughout the delusions, so it was really like actually, you know, I felt like I had to die, I had to be the one to die, and that would be pleasing to God if I died. But another side of me was saying something else. The moral framework that I had within me was somehow coming against that. And however you want to frame it, I believe that God was helping me at that point, not to do whatever my mind was saying. Yes, my Christian formation had a huge bearing at that time, not to do that.
In this situation, Jane’s faith was protective. She felt that she had to die in order to protect her family, but her Christian formation held her back. This protective dimension certainly helps, but still, the intensity of these experiences remains deeply and enduringly troublesome. The ordinary practice of worship seemed thin and unenticing:
The numbness really continued for a long time, and I got really frustrated by it, because I would go every Sunday to church. I would stand there. I’d be exhausted as well, just concentrating was really hard. It was like … it just, there just was no connection, like I had no real connection with God. I knew he was there, but it wasn’t like … I don’t know, I don’t know. It’s really hard to explain. Like if I could engage in worship and respond to God and enjoy that on a Sunday morning or whatever, and there’s a connection that I get. So … but it was just like that didn’t exist for about a year after my first episode. I can’t explain it, it’s a bit strange.
Here we find resonances of the experiences that people living under the description of depression encounter, but for different reasons:
Part of it, I wondered, was maybe the medication, but I just wanted to have my old self back. And I just thought this is awful, you know, standing here and worshiping him and feeling nothing. Everybody else is just praising God, and I wanted to be part of that really. So I went to a prayer meeting. I got prayer a few times, and then I went to one particular meeting one night. I was so frustrated, I just said, please, someone pray for me. I’d had enough of this numbness, and my friend who’s the leader of the church and another friend prayed. And then within a week that numbness had receded and naturally things got much better, which was great. And I was able to relate to God in a way that perhaps I had done before, which was really positive, I thought.
Prayer seemed to help, but there seemed to be nowhere within the established mental health services where this kind of experience could be discussed and worked through: “I think because I’d had very intense spiritual stuff, there was nowhere afterwards to work that through. So, you couldn’t do that in the NHS, so I had to sort of compartmentalize the stuff that I’d experienced; some things I could discuss with my nurse, but there was other stuff which I had no one to talk to about.”16
Jane was fortunate to have a psychiatrist who understood how important Jane’s faith was to her and also took seriously the content of her unconventional beliefs. “Because I said, look, what was that all about? And he said often when you have these delusions you really … it’s what’s important to the person that is coming out. So, while it’s distorted thinking, it’s obviously important to you, the God bit. And so that was all coming out in a really strange way. And I think, after having such intense, strange thoughts, actually I was so numb afterwards that I couldn’t relate to God in a normal way.”
Jane’s psychiatrist recognized that some of her interpretation of her experiences was distorted, but he acknowledged that positive and potentially helpful spiritual dimensions may be mixed in with the more difficult interpretations. How we might understand, discern, and tease out these differences is something we will return to later in the book.
Very often the more energetic dimension of the experience of schizophrenia—hearing voices, seeing things others don’t see, and believing things other people don’t believe—draws our attention. For John, the positive, more florid aspects of his mental health experiences were easier to cope with than the negative ones:
I have become quite good at coping with some of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia. When I hear voices, I have certain ways in which I can cope with that. But what I’ve since discovered is that it’s the negative symptoms of schizophrenia that cause me the most problems. I have not had an acute episode for many years, but I haven’t got rid of those negative symptoms. It’s those negative symptoms in conjunction with my faith, that’s probably been most challenging. I found my faith to be very helpful with the positive symptoms for sure, because I could just give it all to God, as some Christians would put it. With the negative symptoms it’s been a far tougher journey, that still goes on to this day. Sometimes I can just be so tired, and sometimes it can be my motivation, concentration that are the biggest things to suffer. My ability to focus on a task for a good amount of time suffers. And therefore I can feel guilty, like I’m not doing enough. What does God think about this? Yeah, working through those things has been a tricky thing really.
Part of the issue for John relates to the impact of his medication. He is often very drowsy, and although he holds down a good job, he gets exhausted very easily. But it also relates to a general sense of lethargy and negativity that seems to accompany his mental health challenges. This sense of negativity in thought and action has changed the way he processes some aspects of his faith life, and the theological and spiritual practices that accompany it. These changes are not necessarily lesser, but they are certainly different. This has led to a different approach to theology and faith. One thing he has still to do is unlearn certain kinds of theology and relearn certain central things:
I guess, because of the way my brain processes stuff, to this day almost, it’s hard to let go of things that are unhelpful. Some of the theology which I kind of took in hook, line, and sinker as gospel truth to start with without questioning it, without critically assessing it, I had to rethink. For example, the idea that I was ill because God was judging me or that my mental illness was caused by demons. That was tough because I’ve had to unlearn stuff which became sort of hardwired into my brain over the course of my life and which caused me problems, particularly in the early stages of the illness.
We are not talking about people becoming unorthodox. Just as we need a mental health hermeneutic in relation to Scripture reading and interpretation, we also need to remember that theology is a human creation with the primary goal of helping people to love God and glorify God forever. We need to think about theology and Scripture in flexible and contextual ways that enable people to achieve these goals. The voices of people living with mental health challenges are as important as the voices and interpretations of those who are not. Within the body of Jesus, theology needs to care for the needs of all disciples. Many of us strive to make theology complex and complicated.17 For John, the key was to keep things simple:
Pain happens in life, as the bumper sticker says, it’s true. It happens, and I can accept that. So my question to myself was in the light of that, how am I going to live my life? It’s only in recent times that I’ve come to the conclusion really, that the old Golden Rule in the Bible has really helped me in terms of it being, treat people as you would like to be treated. And that’s about as in-depth as I want to get with it really, because I can go off on too many tangents and too many pathways which are unhealthy, and I just think, treat people like you want to be treated. And that’s to me, when Jesus says it sums up the law and the prophets, I think, well, if it’s good enough for him, then it’s good enough for me. Now you [John Swinton] are a theologian, so you might not like that! (laughs) But if it keeps me in touch with Jesus, I’m OK with that. When I’m really ill, I need that simplicity. Actually, when I am well, I need it too.
Loving God, self, and neighbor is not complicated.
As mysterious as schizophrenia may appear to be, people’s experiences and responses are nonetheless understandable. Why? Because they are people! People’s understanding and interpretation of the world may not always be logical, at least according to conventions, but if we think seriously about the meaning of the experience for the individual, some of this might become more understandable. Now, some readers may be thinking, “The people you have engaged with here are clearly suffering from a mild version of schizophrenia. The people I know have quite different experiences.” That may confirm my point about the diversity within the diagnosis, but it doesn’t alter my point that people are people and that love, acceptance, friendship, and belonging form all our heart’s desires. However, the suggestion that some people’s schizophrenia is more severe than other people’s schizophrenia is valid but more complex than it might at first seem. Is this because of the severity of the condition in and of itself, or might other factors exacerbate the severity of people’s experiences? Is schizophrenia simply a naturally occurring spectrum within which some people’s experiences are inevitably worse than others, or might there be something else going on?
1. Katharine Coldiron, “Fractured Origins in Esmé Weijun Wang’s ‘The Collected Schizophrenias,’” Los Angeles Review of Books, February 5, 2019, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/fractured-origins-in-esme-weijun-wangs-the-collected-schizophrenias/.
2. Lori Schiller and Amanda Bennett, The Quiet Room: A Journey out of the Torment of Madness (New York: Warner Books, 2011); Elyn R. Saks, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness (New York: Hachette Books, 2008); Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2019).
3. Coldiron, “Fractured Origins in Esmé Weijun Wang’s ‘The Collected Schizophrenias’” (emphasis added).
4. Anne Harrington, Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness (New York: Norton, 2019), 139–40.
5. Harrington, Mind Fixers, 181.
6. Simon McCarthy-Jones, “The Concept of Schizophrenia Is Coming to an End—Here’s Why,” Independent, September 4, 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/healthy-living/concept-schizophrenia-coming-to-end-psychology-genetics-psychiatry-schizophrenia-a7925576.html.
7. Sato Mitsumoto, “Renaming Schizophrenia: A Japanese Perspective,” World Psychiatry 5, no. 1 (2006): 53–55.
8. Mitsumoto, “Renaming Schizophrenia,” 54.
9. The term “malignant social psychology” was coined by the psychologist Tom Kitwood in relation to the way people with dementia can have their personhood undermined by subtle (and not-so-subtle) slights and negative assumptions that assume that they are no longer fully present as persons. Tom Kitwood, Dementia Reconsidered: The Person Comes First (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1997).
10. Glover, Alien Landscapes?, 90.
11. Glover, Alien Landscapes?, 91–92.
12. Glover, Alien Landscapes?, 91.
13. McCarthy-Jones, “The Concept of Schizophrenia Is Coming to an End—Here’s Why.”
14. H. Writer, “Recovering from Schizophrenia Not Rare,” Healthy Place, last updated June 11, 2019, https://www.healthyplace.com/thought-disorders/schizophrenia-articles/beautiful-but-not-rare-recovery.
15. McCarthy-Jones, “The Concept of Schizophrenia Is Coming to an End—Here’s Why.”
16. The NHS stands for the National Health Service. It refers to the government-funded medical and health-care services that everyone living in the UK can use without being asked to pay the full cost of the service.
17. That is not to say that exploring theology as a complex and dynamic enterprise is not appropriate. I am a professional theologian, so I value complexity. Nevertheless, very often it is the simple things that have tremendous power: “But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong” (1 Cor. 1:27).