Schizophrenia

In 1930, four identical baby girls were born to a family in a small Midwestern town. Genetically, they were as similar as four humans can be—monozygotic quadruplets, sharing 100% of their DNA. They grew up in the same house, with the same parents, eating the same food, attending the same schools. And all four developed schizophrenia. On the surface, this seems like a clear-cut case of genetic determinism: identical genes, identical illness. ...

In 1903, Daniel Paul Schreber, a senior judge in the German court system, published a 450-page memoir titled “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.” The book described in meticulous, articulate detail how God was transforming him into a woman. Not metaphorically. Literally. Through divine rays that penetrated his body and rewrote his nervous system. The transformation, Schreber explained, was necessary because humanity had been destroyed. He needed to become female so he could be impregnated by God and repopulate the Earth with a new race of humans. ...

In July 1959, social psychologist Milton Rokeach gathered three psychiatric patients in a room at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan. Each man had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. And each man believed, with absolute conviction, that he was Jesus Christ. Rokeach’s hypothesis was straightforward: when confronted with two other people making the same claim, at least one of them would experience cognitive dissonance strong enough to crack their delusion. Face-to-face with contradictory evidence, reality would reassert itself. ...