What is Schizophrenia?

I offer online and phone peer support to people with mental illnesses and their family members, and one thing that has become very clear to me as I’ve engaged with them, is that almost no one knows what schizophrenia really is. Even mothers whose adult children have been diagnosed with schizophrenia after a mental health crisis and treatment in a psychiatric hospital, do not know what it is, in particular they often do not know that their adult child experienced psychosis, or understand what psychosis is. They saw that their child said strange things and exhibited strange behaviors, but they don’t know really what it is they were seeing, and that psychosis was causing many of these strange behaviors. In not knowing about psychosis, they are failing to see and understand the core component of their child’s experience that lead to a mental health crisis and resulted in hospitalization.

They’re completely missing what actually happened.

My Gratefulness to God and to the Psychiatric Community for Restoring My Sanity
I first want to explain that my sanity and possibly my life was saved in a psychiatric hospital when a good psychiatrist put me on lithium that brought me out of a psychotic break, and gave me back the use of logic so I could understand God and His truth again.

I believe God uses doctors and hospitals as His agents. We need psychiatric hospitals the way we need ERs and they save lives.

I’m very grateful that psychiatric hospitals and involuntary hospitalization exists! In fact, I even think that involuntary hospitalization needs to be increased to 2-4 weeks from the 72 hours that is usually the law in most states.

Personally I came out of psychosis within 5 days time, but the average time one comes out of it is closer to two weeks, so I believe it should be increased as so many families have the sad story of their psychotic loved one being released too early before the meds kicked in, and racing back to the streets to a lifestyle of illogical living, hiding out in tends from the FBI or refusing to re-establish relationships with family because they believe their family is poisoning them. Some of these people are on the streets in the middle of winter, in dangerous conditions, and some die in such a state.

So we actually need longer involuntary hospitalizations for people with schizophrenia in my opinion.

Lack of Education a Major Deficit in Care
Acknowledging the importance of emergency care in psychiatric hospitals, I also want to draw attention to the deficits and areas that need to be improved. If you have a loved one with schizophrenia, it’s important you understand how the system works and what to expect, what its deficits are, and how to navigate them in order to get the best possible help for your loved one.

The truth is there is a huge lack of education in psychiatric hospitals. The most common protocol is for them to discharge you with a diagnosis, and medication, and instructions on how to take the medication, and give the sufferer and the family zero education about their mental illness.

Once Discharged, the Person is Often Treated as Though They are Not Psychotic
Thus when the family gets home, and the child continues to act different to how he acted before the mental breakdown and hospitalization, families usually deal with him as though he does not have psychosis, as they are unaware he has psychosis, or do not know enough about it to know how to interact with him. When their adult child does things like argues with them about Bible doctrines they used to believe, using nonsensical arguments, or mentions Satan and demons (because they are hearing demonic voices), the mother will tell me that she is going to pray that God will convict her child that he is believing something that goes against the Bible, and convert him back to the faith.

She asks God to appeal to his reason, not understanding that her son is in psychosis, and that the definition of delusions, one of the three core components of psychosis, is that the person’s brain malfunctions, there is reduced neural signaling between the regions of the brain, and the frontal lobe of the brain – the part responsible for reasoning – gets dialed down and disconnected from the other parts, rendering logical thought impossible.

Schizophrenia Similar to a Sleep State, With the Frontal Lobe Under-Active
Psychosis is similar to a sleep state, where there is substantially reduced activity of the frontal lobe and it nearly shuts off, and dreams are highly emotional and nonsensical because emotional centers of the brain are activated, but the frontal lobe, where reason happens, is dialed down.

Such a person needs a lot of understanding and grace, and ongoing medical treatment, but that can’t be given if the parents haven’t been educated on what their child went through and what psychosis is, and they still think his ability to tell right from wrong is fully in tact, and that he was experiencing other kinds of symptoms, but they don’t know about psychosis specifically.

Pressure to Go Off Meds too Soon
If the parents don’t understand their child has been psychotic, and often still is to a large degree after returning home, they can’t adequately support the adult child in taking medication and reducing neuroinflammation so the parts of his brain can connect again, and he can regain the use of his reason. It’s common for parents to want their child off medication, not understanding he’s psychotic and that it’s not safe for his psychosis to go untreated because he can’t reason and will make errors in judgment that can make him a danger to himself or others, and give him untold amounts of mental and psychological suffering. They also often don’t know that anti-psychotic medications are the fastest way to bring a person out of psychosis and work better than natural treatments for this (natural treatments are better for continual improvement; anti-psychotics tend to max out after a few weeks to a few months and continued improvement past that is rare, but they are good for maintaining mental stability and preventing psychotic breaks). The side effects of antipsychotics are atrocious as anyone who has ever been on them will tell you, and the kid will complain and ask to be taken off them, but they are often a necessary evil, as human beings are complex and intelligent beings, and if they lack judgment they can get into all kinds of trouble and danger.

Sometimes pastors may see it as a denial of faith to be on meds, and encourage the person to just pray and seek God. I’ve even experienced pressure from people in the natural health community to not go on medication and use natural approaches, when I was clearly at a point where supplements weren’t working to control my symptoms, and I needed something stronger to pull me out of some residual psychotic symptoms.

There’s pressure from many different sources to take the child off meds before he comes out of psychosis enough to gain awareness of his condition and can be pro-active in his ongoing treatment.

It’s not uncommon that the person goes off meds, and goes back into full-blown psychosis, and enters another crisis situation.

All due to the fact that the family wasn’t educated about psychosis. If they knew what it is, and how serious it is, they would be unlikely to let their child go off the meds and would do everything in their power to keep him on them, until his sanity returned.

Core Beliefs Return to Normal Once Sanity is Restored
Psychosis affects a person’s core beliefs, not because they suddenly believe differently or have made a willful choice to adopt new beliefs, but because losing their ability to reason they now string together information about reality in nonsensical – and often very creative – ways. They change in personality and in values due to it, and adopt strange beliefs and religious practices that aren’t like them, sometimes even holding outright contradictory beliefs. The way to get them to go back to who they were and the beliefs and values they cherished prior to psychosis – back to the real “them” – is to treat their brain. When they see the world correctly, they will return to their usual way of interacting in it and their core beliefs. If in psychosis, the person hasn’t committed sin when they adopt strange beliefs about God or when they stop going to church due to catatonia (inability to move). You can’t act normally with God or anyone else when your basic understanding of the world and of Bible doctrine has been twisted and distorted due to psychosis.

It feels like your brain and sense of self is fragmented. You can’t even adequately connect with yourself, let alone other people, or even God. You can’t even correctly conceptualize who you are, and the person often believes delusions about the self such as that they are secretly famous or have famous people as their friends, or that they are Mary and pregnant with Jesus, and other delusions.

If they were a Christian prior to developing psychosis, a person will start living a Christian life that aligns with the Bible again when their brain goes back to aligning with reality again.

If they were an atheist by choice before entering psychosis, they will return to atheism once sanity returns.

If they were Buddhist before psychosis, they will return to being Buddhist once sanity is restored.

From there they can then decide whether to stay atheist, or stay Buddhist, or to choose to believe in God. When sanity is restored moral agency is restored, they will once again be able to hear and understand the Holy Spirit’s convictions, and they can then be prayed for to become converted.

My Psychosis Taken as Rebellion When it Was Mental Confusion
In my own life, I had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals and my family was still not educated or told about psychosis. My bizarre behavior and adoption of strange beliefs was often (though not always as some did know I was suffering) seen as teenage rebellion and angst, and even many years later during my worst psychotic break I’ve ever had, when at age 32 I ran down the street at 5 am and acted impulsively and bizarrely, and my very logical mother knew something serious was wrong, she still didn’t know it was psychosis. (I had enough awareness to know if I shared my belief with her that I was called by God to open dimension portals to save the world that she would not believe me, but not enough awareness to know that my beliefs were delusional.) After coming out of psychosis in the hospital, I knew immediately I had been experiencing psychosis as the new thought patterns that aligned with reality were so obviously on-point, and my old distorted thought patterns now seemed nonsensical, but there was much I still needed to know about psychosis, and some of the other symptoms I needed to monitor and watch out for, and I didn’t know to do that or how to do that, and the doctors and staff did not educate me about my psychotic break and my mental illness (I was diagnosed with bipolar 1 at that time, and then later schizoaffective, both of which are very similar to schizophrenia). I was just discharged and sent home, and this is the norm for mental health treatment. I had to educate myself when I got home, and I found it difficult to find adequate information about my illness and other similar psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia. There’s a huge lack of education on this mental illness in society, and a huge need for it. Even when I explain to them what it is, they are so unfamiliar with it that much confusion still exists in their mind. So I decided to write a whole article on what schizophrenia is, to endeavor to make the condition more familiar and less shrouded in darkness.

What Society Thinks Schizophrenia Is
The commonly-held misconception in society is that schizophrenia is when a person has multiple personalities. When they express one personality for a while and then involuntarily switch and express another personality; it kind of comes over them. You may have heard friends tease each other, referencing the condition in a joking and inaccurate way, when their friend makes quick changes in preferences. One says “I want to go to Subway, no wait let’s go bowling instead.” Their friend jokes “You’re so schizophrenic, make up your mind!”

Multiple personalities is not schizophrenia. Multiple Personality Disorder (now called Dissociative Identity Disorder – DID), is a different condition from schizophrenia. People with schizophrenia do not have multiple personalities. Rather they experience something that feels like a fragmentation of the self, a fragmentation of their perception of reality, along with auditory hallucinations (voices), or visual hallucinations. Not everyone with schizophrenia has both hallucinations and delusions. Only one is needed to get a diagnosis of schizophrenia, or you can also get a diagnosis from having a thought disorder with no hallucinations or delusions. Word salad which is where you can’t string together a coherent sentence, and other forms of incoherent speech are usually the indicators psychiatrists use to determine the person is experiencing thought disorder, as it reveals their thoughts and not just their words are incoherent. (The reason behind why the person is speaking unintelligible words is because their thoughts are disjointed and incoherent).

Disintegrated or fragmented is a good descriptor of what it feels like to have schizophrenia. Your perception can’t integrate and you can’t see reality as one coherent picture. You don’t have a sense of self that is coherent either and may think you’re God and yourself, or that you’re famous or somehow connected with famous people and can’t see that doesn’t make sense.

Brain scans of people with the condition show the frontal lobe – the part of the brain that allows people to reason and think logically – is dialed down and not signaling properly with the other regions of the brain. The person enters a mental state that is similar to dreaming where the frontal lobe is similarly dialed down and there’s emotion and activity going on in other regions of the brain, but not in the logical center.

Schizophrenia is not an ultra-rare condition, and somewhere around 1.5-2% of the population have it. Let’s just take the number on the higher end…in a church with 100 people, you’ll have two members with schizophrenia. Bipolar 1 is a similar illness to schizophrenia, and it affects 3.5% of the population. That’s 3 people in a church of 100. So in a church of 100, there will be 5 people with a psychotic disorder in your midst.

The truth is you have probably already come in contact with someone with schizophrenia.


Homeless and Schizophrenic?
You know that homeless person on the side of the road, that you drive by on your way to work? The red head with the slight build who is very charismatic and looks like he could be an actor or a speaker? The one who looks like he’s talking to himself, or maybe speaking out loud to God, who folds his hands to pray and then shouts? If you walk by him he calls out to you to prepare for the end of the world, and people often wonder why he doesn’t try to better himself and get a job instead of being hyper-focused on the end. Doesn’t he want to eat? He looks famished. The one that when people engage with him in conversation they find out he has unconventional ideas about God and science, claims to belong to a religion that no one else is a part of. He thinks he’s somehow related to John the Baptist. At first you think this means he thinks he shares DNA with the prophet and is an ancestor, but if you talk more with him you find out he thinks he’s the successor of John the Baptist and has the prophetic gift. But his prophecies don’t make logical sense and definitely don’t line up with the scriptures.

He claims to have been a concert violinist in the past, but most people doubt that’s true, because they’ve grown used to the fact that much of what he says doesn’t add up or make sense. Then one day someone gives him a violin and you see him on the street corner playing it in beautiful tones. Clearly he’s not a novice. So what is he doing on the streets; why isn’t he still playing in the concert halls?

This man has schizophrenia.

The Word is The Source of Truth
But what is schizophrenia? Well the way to conceptualize anything is by the Word of God alone. We don’t want human opinions when it comes to truth, because human ideas of what is true outside of and apart from the Word of God, will just be error and not true at all.

As explained in an earlier article, the Bible does support that mental illnesses exist, that the brain is a physical organ that responds to psychological stress or physical stressors such as Lyme disease with dysfunction and malfunction, just as every other part of the body can do. Because we have that basis from the Word of God, we can study the human brain using MRI imaging machines and blood tests, and questionnaires to gauge mental acuity and analyze a person’s perception and processing. Because the brain is physical and people do not possess and immaterial spirit, we can study the brain, even the parts that make up the self and the personality, and our perception of the self.

When the brain malfunctions it’s much more complex than when a kidney malfunctions. Our brain is involved in all of our perceptions of the world around us. Our eyes merely take in information; they don’t conceptualize. To even look at a computer screen and know it’s a computer, involves brain processing. The eyes only take in the image; they don’t recognize it as a computer.

Every thing that we look at with our eyes in this world, has a corresponding neural circuitry in our brain that recognizes that thing and tells us what it is. Not only does it tell us what it is, but it tells us what attributes and qualities it possesses – whether it is blue or black, whether it is large or small, how many inches high it is, and how it relates to other things and what attributes it shares in common with them. For instance, our brain categorizes information and can conclude that a hammer and a wrench are both tools, categorizing them based on functionality.

Our brain tells us when we’ve said something that is an exaggeration, and sends an impulse to us, if we are a Christian, to correct our mistake, and to make a point to be accurate. It tells us also when we under-emphasize something important and need to put more emphasis on it.

Involuntary, unconscious processes in our brain tell us when we’re sitting upright and when we’re too far to the side, and the result is we never fall over or stumble out of control.

Our brain does all of this, and so much more, every day. But when someone has psychosis, all of these categorizations get misplaced and connected in the wrong ways. Incoherence and illogical thinking results. A person may see a wrench and hammer and conclude that the common denominator between the two is that they are used by a person, rather than that they are tools. The person can no longer see what things are, and the connections between ideas; can no longer categorize information into the right concepts.

A good definition for the distorted thinking that occurs in psychosis is that it is when your brain makes the wrong connections between things and ideas, and when it fails to see what things are, often combining two things or concepts into one idea. For instance, the FBI which is a purely human organization, will get conflated with a divine mind, and the person will believe the FBI is basically an omnipresent, omniscient organization with more than human power to spy on them at all times and always know where they are.

Or the person may believe something like they are God, or a famous person and themselves at the same time.

Hardware and Software Analogy
Let’s use the analogy of hardware and software with computers. Let’s say that a “hardware” problem is a brain problem – the biochemistry and neural signaling is disrupted and contorted, and this is happening at the biological level. This is causing the person to come to false beliefs.

And let’s say a “software” problem is something psychological, like an atheist who doesn’t want to believe there is a God because he has sins he wants to keep doing. So he adopts a false belief due to a spiritual and psychological reason.

Or a software problem can also be a lack of education or being taught misinformation. Someone in a Buddhist country has never had access to a Bible, therefore they lack the knowledge necessary to adopt Christian beliefs.

Psychosis a “Hardware” problem, Not a “Software” Problem
Using this analogy psychosis is not a “software” problem. The person isn’t coming to the wrong conclusions about what things are and how they are interrelated, categorized, and connected because they have been raised with falsehoods, and they need to have access to the truth in order to come to the right conclusions, or something purely psychological such as they don’t feel ready to hear the truth so they are blocking it out and choosing to believe a lie instead. Of course, this happens to people all the time. Such people are merely misinformed and need education, or they are dealing with psychological pain that needs to be addressed and they may need encouragement and to develop resolve to embrace the truth, knowing truth will eventually set us free, even if there’s pain along the way, and facing and embracing the truth is the only way to peace.

It’s even possible for a person to believe very nonsensical things due to psychological reasons. A person involved in pantheistic religions, may want to believe they are a divine being, part of the divine consciousness that permeates and lives inside all things. Or someone may reject Christianity to believe in evolution, that they are no more than a highly evolved animal and there is no God.

It’s true that people can believe very disjointed, nonsensical things for psychological reasons, perhaps a desire to be the highest authority in their life and not to submit to God’s authority and His moral law. A young man may want to sleep around in college, and he knows it’s wrong, and so he embraces evolution and secularism as a way to justify his actions and continue his immoral behaviors.

A young woman growing up in a Buddhist part of the world like Bangladesh for instance, may believe in pantheism because she hasn’t had access to knowledge of the Bible. She may be innocently ignorant.

But people in full psychosis are different. They are not choosing to believe nonsensical things. And they aren’t believing nonsensical things due to misinformation or a lack of education. These things aren’t the cause behind their nonsensical conclusions. They are dealing with a “hardware” problem, not a “software” problem. No, in their case, the brain has been rewired due to the altered neurochemistry, and electrical waves and other physical factors, and it can’t operate with the correct neural connections needed to arrive at true conclusions that allow it to rightly interpret and understand reality

This is a hardware problem. The person’s brain is malfunctioning, rendering sane, logical thought impossible.

Another term for the laws of logic, is the laws of understanding. It is the laws of logic that allow us to understand anything. When your physical brain malfunctions in such a severe way to render logical thought completely impossible, as happens during a psychotic break, understanding becomes impossible.

Thus the person can’t understand what things are and how they work and how they are connected with one another.

Thus the person wrongly concludes something like the FBI is inserting messages into their minds when they hear audible voices, because they can’t rightly conceptualize what the FBI is, giving them divine properties such as the ability to read and understand one’s thoughts, to always know where they are at all times, rather than seeing them as finite human beings in an organization limited by the current technology of the time period. They lose the ability to understand the current technology. Even if they study it, their mind forms wrong connections and conclusions, such as that the technology definitely can read our thoughts and insert thoughts into our mind, because if we can put thoughts and concepts into a computer through internet signals, then the FBI could use such signals to insert thoughts into our minds which will be picked up like a radio frequency and projected into our mind.

They can’t see that the human brain doesn’t have receptors radio signals, and has the completely wrong configuration to pick up such signals and interpret them as messages.

They also can’t rightly conceptualize what schizophrenia or mental illness is, and so they can’t make the connection that voices in your head could be mental illness.

When we’re talking about perception we’re basically talking about consciousness. And who knows all that is involved in consciousness? No one but God can understand something so complex. To be conscious involves God giving the breath of life into our body.

“For in him we live and move and have our being.”
Acts 17:28

“…He who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and its offspring, who gives breath to the people on it and life to those who walk in it:”
Isaiah 42:5

“In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.”
Job 12:10

Our bodies are made of atoms, but these atoms are not conscious on their own. It takes the power of God to make us conscious. The mystery of how the Holy Spirit infuses the body and brain with life and gives us consciousness can never be known, and is outside of the ability of a human being to understand. That is God’s domain and only a divine Being can understand it.


However, while we can’t study the Holy Spirit who gives us consciousness and life, we can study our physical brain and how it operates while alive with science.

Imagine the complexity of the thought patterns and perceptions of a human being. Now imagine that due to the fall, malfunction of this brain is introduced and becomes possible (illness and malfunction were not possible before Adam introduced sin into this world). Now imagine that a specific individual person is healthy and happy in their early years, until they experience very real personal stressors in their life, such as they get bit by a tick and develop Lyme disease, or they live in a house with copper pipes, and they become copper toxic, and this affects the epigenetic expression of their body and they develop a mental illness. As you can guess, the possible ways their brain could malfunction and their perception could become distorted, could be almost endless.

This is why when a person develops schizophrenia, their perceptions and ideas about many different topics and concepts in the world can be distorted in almost endless ways. They can be illogical in an almost endless amount of ways, and there are an almost endless about of delusions they can believe. The delusions can be things that are incorrect but make some sense as they could be possible but simply aren’t, such as believing one is famous, or they can be things even more incoherent and disjointed in logic such as believing one is literally the devil and God at the same time, or that one can open dimension portals by swiping their hand. Depending on the unique neural wiring the inflammation from the underlying illness is giving you, you will have different connections, and they may be only slightly disjointed and disconnected from reality, or they may be very disjointed and very disconnected with the logical connections we see in reality.

Grouping of Symptoms
Schizophrenia is a grouping of mental symptoms. Psychiatry has simply grouped together a set of mental malfunction and given it the name schizophrenia. In mainstream psychiatry, the mental illnesses recognized in the DSM 5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual which is the book Drs. use for diagnosing and treating patients), are defined by clusters of symptoms. There’s many different overlapping symptoms among diagnoses. For instance, post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) has many overlapping symptoms with schizophrenia. But in order for one to be said to have schizophrenia, they must have a certain number of symptoms listed in the schizophrenia diagnosis. They can’t get a schizophrenia diagnosis from having some of the symptoms of schizophrenia; they must meet a certain base amount of the schizophrenia symptoms in order to be said to have it.

In mainstream psychiatry, medical tests are not done to determine if one has schizophrenia, and there are no physical markers that can be said to be schizophrenia. What I mean by this is that while schizophrenia has been linked to things like high dopamine, and this is known in psychiatry and can be found in the medical literature, and it’s also been linked to high glutamate. So there isn’t one biomarker that has been shown to cause schizophrenia. There’s a number of different imbalances that can be involved, and there’s evidence for different kinds of schizophrenia. Someone can get the same symptoms of schizophrenia from high dopamine, another from high glutamate.

No medical testing is done to diagnose someone with schizophrenia, however. Diagnosis is given based on an interview with a psychiatrist, and written tests. And while high dopamine is involved in schizophrenia, high dopamine is also involved in anxiety disorders and other mental illnesses. Thus there are a number of mental disorders that can be produced by high dopamine, and just which symptoms the person develops from the high dopamine will vary from person to person, due to genetics, and their unique individuality.

This is very different from say getting a diagnosis of cancer, where a biopsy is taken, and that specific form of cancer is found in your body, and you’re diagnosed based on that. But this way of diagnosing is similar to the way something like an autoimmune disease is diagnosed. Sometimes CRP (inflammation) markers are raised and a person is diagnosed with an autoimmune disease based on that, but many times there are no physical markers when a person has an autoimmune disease and they are diagnosed based on symptoms alone.

So, really schizophrenia is just a cluster of mental symptoms a person is suffering with.

Which is why it’s so common to start off with one diagnosis – say depression – and then later your low mood and lack of energy develops into seeing and hearing things that aren’t there, and you get a schizophrenia diagnosis. If depression and schizophrenia were biochemically completely different, it wouldn’t be so common that depression develops into schizophrenia. This happens because many of the same imbalances that cause depression also cause schizophrenia, such as weakened immunity, histamine toxicity, Lyme disease.

All Mental Illnesses in DSM 5 Epigenetic in Nature, Not Purely Genetic
Mainstream psychiatry as well as Functional Medicine recognizes that all the mental illnesses in the DSM 5 are epigenetic in nature. What this means is one is not born with them and they aren’t purely genetic. They come about as a result of genetic susceptibility (usually) and environmental stressors. These stressors can be purely psychological, such as verbal abuse, or physical such as Lyme disease.

What this means is if you shift the body towards health and balance, you can shift the epigenetic expression of the body, and your symptoms can become less severe and you can improve. Conversely, if you come in contact with more toxins or stressors, symptoms will worsen.

Yet unfortunately, mainstream psychiatrists often say things to their newly diagnosed patients like “You will have schizophrenia for the rest of your life.” While it is common that by the time a person has had a complete psychotic break that their body is very toxic and there’s lots of inflammation and weakened immunity, and that many of these people won’t return to how they were before developing schizophrenia, and their condition is very serious, it’s inaccurate to say they definitely won’t recover completely. Spontaneous recovery due to reduction in the stressors that brought on the condition does happen, in fact there is a study that says the spontaneous recovery rate is 50% in underdeveloped countries.

Many Functional Medicine doctors believe the toxins in industrialized countries is what contributes to us having more mental conditions and a lesser rate of spontaneous recovery from conditions like schizophrenia.

Hollywood made a movie called a Beautiful Mind about the mathematician John Nash who had schizophrenia. But they left out that he was actually one of those people who spontaneously recovered.

It does happen, and if you add in nutrient protocols, and detox protocols that get toxins out of your cells and brain and treat your condition, there’s an even higher chance you will recover.

Schizophrenia is like depression. Perhaps you’ve known someone with a life-long tendency towards depression who had decades where they were fine and happy, then when major stressors in life hit such as a death in the family, they would slip into depression again for 4 or 5 years, then come out of it and be fine again. That’s how epigenetic conditions work. The greater the stressors, the more it turns on the expression of the faulty genes and symptoms worsen; the less the stress the lighter the symptoms, and it some cases it’s possible to completely recover.

That person with depression may never experience it again in a chronic way if they are treated with nutrient therapy. I know my depression has improved greatly from amino acids and b6 which is the cofactor the body uses to make calming neurotransmitters like Gaba and serotonin.

If you do happen to mostly or fully recover from schizophrenia, mainstream psychiatrists will say you had brief psychotic disorder if your psychosis didn’t last more than 6 months and that you didn’t really have schizophrenia after all.

If your psychosis lasted longer than 6 months, but you’ve now recovered they will usually just change your diagnosis with no explanation about it, from schizophrenia to something like Borderline Personality Disorder (this happened to a friend of mine), leaving you to assume that they must have decided they got your initial diagnosis wrong.

A mistake in diagnosis does happen, but if someone gets better from their condition they weren’t simply misdiagnosed. Their condition has improved. They’ve experienced a partial or full recovery from it. This is not usually acknowledged by mainstream psychiatry, sadly, even though they definitely believe in this concept as it follows from the belief that these conditions are epigenetic in nature, and if you were to point out their epigenetic nature, they would in fact agree with you when directly questioned.

But it’s part of the mainstream psychiatry culture to be silent about this fact and not make people aware of this.

How Functional Medicine Diagnoses Mental Conditions

In Functional Medicine a person is diagnosed based on testing, but they are not diagnosed with an illness based on the testing. So you wouldn’t go to a Functional Medicine doctor and have your copper levels tested and maybe your methylation tested or get tested for mercury toxicity, have these tests come back positive, and then get a schizophrenia diagnosis. They also wouldn’t give you an MS diagnosis or anything like that either. Rather, your diagnosis would be copper toxicity, overmethylation (if you tested as overmethylating), and mercury toxicity. This would be your diagnosis, and then the mental symptoms you had – say delusions and hallucinations – would be seen as symptoms. You would then work to reduce your delusions and hallucinations by getting the heavy metals out of your body and correcting the biochemical imbalance of overmethylation with supplements that slow down the methylation cycle. You would then likely experience a reduction in delusions and hallucinations.

Seeing Functional Medicine practitioners and being tested and put on supplement protocols to balance my biochemical imbalances was a huge part of my healing, and I see continual improvement in my thinking even today. I keep getting better as I do different treatments, most recently herbs that boost something called BDNF that enables the body to heal and repair neurons.

Schizophrenia is a Syndrome, or Condition, Not an Illness
I prefer to refer to the Functional Medicine way of referring to mental conditions. I don’t think it’s accurate to conceptualize schizophrenia as an illness of its own. It’s a white lie to say it’s its own illness, because an illness requires known pathology that is unique to that illness. If you have ovarian cancer for instance, it’s diagnosed based on the actual presence of the cancer and the location. No other condition has that pathology except cancer. But with schizophrenia there are multiple known pathologies, not just one. For instance, both low and high dopamine contribute to schizophrenia symptoms, high histamine does too, as do many other things. I think it’s honest to think of schizophrenia as a condition or syndrome, or a set of symptoms. Like how Chronic Fatigue syndrome can be caused by many different things and is referred to as a syndrome, we really should be referring to schizophrenia as a syndrome as well, caused by things like heavy metal toxicity, or abuse experienced as a child, or Lyme disease, etc.

The term ‘schizophrenia’ is helpful as it allows for a person to quickly refer to a set of symptoms all at once, rather than having to list out 10-15 symptoms every time they want to mention what they are experiencing or refer to their condition. But we need to be calling this schizophrenia syndrome and conceptualize it as a syndrome. I think this is the honest way to look at it.

Symptoms of Schizophrenia

But which symptoms are we talking about here? Which symptoms make up schizophrenia?

There are a number of them, but I would say that the symptom of psychosis is the most important one. It’s the one that affects a person’s ability to tell right from wrong and function as a moral agent. As Christians we understand that this function is the most important one that God gave us, and it’s far superior to other functions such as the ability to feel emotions, that if they are compromised is not nearly as serious of an issue, though it’s still a problem. Moral perception is involved in our ability to glorify God, to make choices to repent of sin, have faith in a Savior, and walk in obedience to His commands. It’s this perception more than any other that separates us from the animals and makes us in the image of God, though every part of our design is also involved in us being in the image of God, this one is the most central.

Psychosis is the symptom that can lead to things like a suicide because a person is under the delusion that they must kill themselves in order to save the world. It’s the symptom that involves errors in judgment and in the understanding of the world and how it works.

Psychosis is three main symptoms: delusions, thought disorder, and hallucinations. Delusions are nonsensical beliefs that a person cannot see around or reason to know they are untrue. The person comes to these nonsensical conclusions and beliefs because their brain is biochemically imbalanced, and the imbalance makes it so they cannot use the laws of logic (the laws required to understand anything). Their brain malfunctions and becomes incapable of logic. Thus they deduce and add up many things wrong. The more severe the illness, the more things they get wrong and can’t add up logically.

Thought disorders are ontologically the same concept as delusions. Ontology is the study in philosophy of what things are. For instance, the definition of a square being a shape with 4 equal sides and corners at each end, is ontology. So what I mean by referring to ontology is that thought disorders (most of them; there are a few that don’t fit into the same category), and delusions are the same concept. They are when the brain breaks the laws of logic, and thus the person can’t understand things, or make sense when they speak. An example of a thought disorder is something like incoherent speech, also known as word salad. The person seems disoriented, and gives random incoherent words, like “Eat, figurines. I must solution for ever.” Another example of a thought disorder is clanging speech, where a person uses words with the same consonants and general sound, sometimes in a sing-songy poetic way. So you may ask them how they are doing, and they may reply “Cocacola clutters the counter-top, but I like a crisp sip of soda.”

There are some thought disorders that ontologically are not the same concept as delusions. One of these is poverty of speech, which is just where the brain is devoid of conscious, intentional thinking, and the person is zoning out due to inflammation that has become so strong it’s made it impossible or very hard for the person to access thoughts and retrieve information. This obviously isn’t the same thing as a delusion that involves neural wiring distorting logic. It can be from extreme stress and inflammation and parts of the brain just stop working due to fear or stress and are temporarily “paralyzed”.

But the thought disorders that are at the heart of psychotic disorders are the ones where there’s a break-down in logic. In psychiatry they break up delusions and the thought disorders that also involve a loss of logic and problems with logic, and list them as separate symptoms. This is probably done to distinguish them from each other, so a family member or a doctor can distinguish between when a person is more loosely connected with reality as is the case when a person has word salad and can’t even form a coherent sentence, and when they are more closely connected with reality, as is the case with say a persecutory delusion that the FBI is inserting thoughts into their mind, and the person can form these thoughts into sentences and talk about them. In both cases – word salad and a persecutory delusion – the person’s brain is incapable of logic, but definitely with word salad their logic is even more disjointed than with the persecutory delusion.

It’s important to understand and point out that when a person has word salad or other incoherent speech, that their brain is malfunctioning and this is why the speech isn’t coherent. This is not a problem with the mouth or the ability to speak. The person can form words fine, and they have no speech impediment. The reason nonsense is spoken is because the brain is confused and is processing ideas and concepts in a disjointed, nonsensical way.

Hallucinations are when the part of the brain involved in imagery and sound is over-activated, often due to brain inflammation. Just as your computer can have images and music pop up randomly when you haven’t clicked on anything, when you get a computer virus, then brain when inflamed can have random images and voices pop up and see and hear things that aren’t there.

Of these symptoms, the most important is delusions and thought disorder. This is not to say that auditory or visual hallucinations are not a series problem and do not need to be treated – they are definitely very serious and cause a lot of distress to a person with a psychotic disorder, and they definitely need to be treated. But the most important symptoms are delusions and thought disorders – the symptoms where there is a loss of understanding and logic. If someone sees a vision they think is from God, but it’s a delusion, and in this vision “God” tells them to kill themselves in order to save the world, if they still have the ability to be logical and they have moral understanding, they can check that message with the scriptures, and know there is no way God would actually want them to do that, and that it goes against God’s Word to take their life – the Bible sees it as self-murder and instead our admonition in the scriptures is to take care of our bodies because Christ loves us and died for us.

But if they lose judgment and moral perception, then they cannot check the hallucination with the truth in God’s Word. They may study their Bible and come to wrong conclusions, and may determine that they do need to take their life.

A delusion such as this one is known as a delusion of persecution or martyrdom, and this is a common symptom people in full psychosis experience.

Other symptoms of schizophrenia include things like intense fatigue, catatonia which is where the person is frozen in a position and cannot move, which is very debilitating as sometimes people in such a state cannot even get up to go to the bathroom or to eat or drink, cognitive symptoms which mean it’s hard for them to figure out how to do basic tasks such as how to load a CD onto a computer, or they can’t process the meaning of the words when they read a book, and they have to keep reading a sentence over-and-over, racing thoughts, anxiety, insomnia, flat affect, which is where your face does not show emotion, anhedonia which is where you can’t feel your emotions and you just feel completely numb.

Schizophrenia isn’t the only mental illness that involves psychosis (delusions, though disorder, and hallucinations). PTSD can also sometimes involve hallucinations. Bipolar 1 disorder always involves psychosis. Even anxiety disorders and depression are now known to sometimes involve psychosis, and I think psychosis is on the rise so some of this may not just be psychiatrists becoming more aware of psychosis occurring in depression and anxiety disorders, but that there’s just more people developing psychosis than in the past.

The illnesses with psychosis as a main symptom are really schizophrenia, bipolar 1, schizoaffective, and delusional disorder. But once again, I believe it’s honest to think of these as conditions or syndromes, not as individual illnesses.

Bipolar 1 and schizoaffective, are basically just schizophrenia with mood symptoms. Both involve mania – periods of elevated mood and energy – and depression – periods of reduction in mood and energy. In bipolar 1 the person only has psychotic symptoms when either in depression or mania, and not when cycling out of depression and into mania, or the reverse, cycling out of mania and into depression. In schizoaffective, the person has psychotic symptoms the entire time, whether in depression, mania, or in-between.

The Simplest Way to Explain Psychotic Disorders Medically

After seeing doctors – both mainstream psychiatrists and being put on medication – and Functional Medicine doctors and doing supplement protocols, and doing personal research about psychotic disorders over the course of about 8 years now, my conclusion is that the simplest way to explain psychotic disorders like schizophrenia from a medical standpoint is to say that a dysregulated immune system is the underlying common denominator behind all cases of psychosis.

It’s the dysregulated immunity that you will see mentioned in the medical literature as the cause of both the positive symptoms like voices and delusions, and negative symptoms like catatonia, poverty of speech, and anhedonia.

In cases of systemic inflammation it’s common for part of the immune response to be revved up too high. This is a state the body goes into when killing off infections and protecting itself against pathogens or psychological stressors. This brings on the fight-or-flight response, which is a state of heightened alertness that leads into the psychotic symptoms.

In fight-or-flight other parts of the immune response are dialed down. This brings on the negative symptoms.

If the person stays too long in fight-or-flight they can have a chronic psychotic disorder.

Not everyone who enters fight-or-flight will develop psychosis. Some people in chronic fight-or-flight will get anxiety disorders, cancer, and other illnesses and not a psychotic disorder. The specific condition you get is different, and things like genetics, your unique brain temperament and biochemistry, and the types of exposures and stressors you’re exposed to play a factor in which illnesses and which symptoms you will develop.

When the under-activated part of the immune system is balanced out and boosted by to health, negative symptoms reduce and are eliminated.

When the overactive immune response which is giving brain inflammation, is calmed back down and balanced out, the positive symptoms like delusions and voices abate.

When the immune system is dysregulated, neurotransmitters and hormones like cortisol get thrown out of whack. The exact way in which they are thrown off is different and varies person-by-person due to factors like your unique genetics, the type of brain and temperament you have, etc. Some people are naturally, even when healthy, higher in dopamine than other people. These people tend to be very creative. When in a state of chronic fight-or-flight when dopamine usually rises even higher, these people experience much higher dopamine levels than the general population and are more prone to developing psychotic disorders specifically as a result of stress, as opposed to developing cancer.

Even among people who develop psychotic disorders, there’s variation. Some of them experience histamine being too high, rather than dopamine. Besides genetic factors and brain temperament and natural biochemistry, which can be histamine-dominant even in a healthy person and predispose the person to histamine toxicity when in a chronic state of fight-or-flight (histamine-dominant people tend to be your very ambitious and highly motivated people), exposure to mold mycotoxins is another factor that tends to cause people to develop psychosis from histamine rather than other neurotransmitters. A history of allergies and sensitivities also makes a person more likely to develop psychosis from histamine.

Fun-loving, life of the party people are often naturally high in serotonin. They do very poorly on SSRIs, which can make them manic and psychotic. When in the fight-or-flight response such people tend to overproduce serotonin and can become psychotic from serotonin going too high.

You can see how there are biochemical types of psychosis, and even within each profile, there’s variation, for instance two people may both dopamine and histamine dominant psychosis, but one of them may have dopamine and histamine at the same levels, and the other may have dopamine higher than histamine. Or maybe the second person also has slightly high serotonin levels that are also contributing to their psychosis and revved up state.

No two people are exactly alike. And there’s more variation than just neurotransmitters too. One person may have lead toxicity contributing to the immune dysregulation, and the other person may have mercury toxicity. These variations will affect how the psychosis manifests and also which neurotransmitters are dysregulated and in what way.

But the common denominator between all cases of psychotic conditions, is the immune dysregulation.

I’ve found that taking herbs to boost and modulate my immune response has been one of my most effective treatments for my mental symptoms. In particular, my anhedonia, which is a state of total emotional numbness, did not respond very well to medications, which is common, but it responded excellently to supplements that boost the immune response and get blood flow into the deep regions of the brain to restore cell-signaling and neurotransmitters to those parts, which resulted in feelings coming back.

It’s well-known in the medical literature that negative symptoms don’t respond as well to anti-psychotic medications as the positive symptoms do, thus many people who have been brought out of psychosis with antipsychotics are left in a state where they aren’t delusional and their voices are greatly reduced, but they still have no emotions, and have symptoms like flat affect where they have little facial expression, and poverty of thought where they don’t have access to thoughts and their brain is very dialed down so they can’t participate in life and communicate with loved ones.

The immune-modulating supplements like bovine colostrum and ginkgo biloba can help greatly in such cases.

The Walsh protocol for mental illnesses and conditions helps greatly too. Walsh has identified 5 different biotypes that can cause everything from ADHD and depression to schizophrenia and bipolar. He focuses mainly on neurotransmitters and biological processes that affect neurotransmitters, such as methylation which if too low can cause a person to have too high levels of histamine, and if too high causes a person too have too low levels of histamine (too high or too low is not good; balance is key), and causes dopamine and norepinephrine to be too high.

I have psychosis from 3 different Walsh biotypes, and taking supplements to correct these 3 different imbalances helped me with mood swings and logic, in particular. But the immune-modulating supplements helped me most with the anhedonia.

Everyone is different in how they respond but many people have seen a moderate to great improvement from the Walsh protocol. It’s often the case that a person with a psychotic condition can greatly reduce their antipsychotic medication after getting on Walsh supplements, and some can go off meds completely and supplements are enough to control symptoms. This is me most of the time. Most of the time I don’t need medication and can control my symptoms with supplements alone, but when exposed to mold or ragweed, which I’m very sensitive to, histamine goes too high for me and brings on compulsions and psychosis, and I need to get on antihistamine antipsychotics at a low dose.

But for the most part I only take supplements and have good mental processing.

If you’re interested in learning about supplement protocols, I recommend a book called ‘Natural Healing for Schizophrenia’ by Eva Edelman. In it she includes all of the currently-known natural protocols for schizophrenia. It’s very comprehensive, and I found it very helpful in my recovery.

It is at first quite overwhelming, so don’t take it all in at once, but try a few things in it and see if they help you, and if not try a few more.

Here is a link to purchase the book:

Natural Healing for Schizophrenia & Other Common Mental Disorders | Borage Books

I also recommend William Walsh’s book called ‘Nutrient Power’. He developed the Walsh protocol, so his book includes only one protocol and is a lot less comprehensive than Eva Edelman’s book (The Walsh protocol is in Eva’s book too). However, his protocol is very helpful and his book is more intellectual and scientific, so it appeals to that kind of reader. Eva’s book is written in a way that is tailored more to the average person without a scientific background.

Nutrient Power – Walsh Research Institute

But, If My Loved One is Hearing Demon Voices, Doesn’t That Mean They are Being Harassed by Demons?

It’s common when a loved one is found to be hearing voices, especially if the loved one reports hearing demon voices, and is diagnosed with a psychotic disorder such as schizophrenia, that family members will ask the question: “How can this not be demons when my loved one is hearing demonic voices and the nature of the things they are commanding him to do are immoral things like suicide?”

They see the voices as having evil intent, however, they aren’t taking into account a couple of very important things.

Everyone Hears Demons, but In Cases of Real Demons, They Flee When We Resist Them
For one, everyone hears demons in some way and is tempted by demons and yet we aren’t all troubled over the voices to the extent that the loved one who has been hospitalized is troubled.

There are actual mediums who channel spirits every day (this is a serious sin don’t do it! I’m just bringing it up to make a point), and yet who do not experience the loud voices that people diagnosed with schizophrenia here, making it hard or impossible to sleep, troubling them 24/7.

There are over a billion Catholics in the world who practice sorcery and mediumship by praying to Mary and the saints. They are not all troubled in the way people diagnosed with schizophrenia are troubled.

I’m not making the argument here that demons can’t trouble someone mentally or insert loud voices into their minds…in fact there are accounts of people involved in witchcraft and other false religions where people report they are mentally harassed by demons…I’m just endeavoring to stimulate logical thought when it comes to this subject.

I think there’s far too much emotional thinking when it comes to the subject of demon-possession, and not enough sound logic.

The Bible says every Christian will be tempted by Satan. This is a normal part of life in this world. That’s not to say it isn’t difficult or awful to have Satan here in this world with us, but due to the fall and the situation we’re in now as a result of the fall, Christians are daily tempted by demons directly everyday. Even Jesus was tempted by Satan daily when He walked on earth as a man. The Bible doesn’t say that we’re supposed to consider temptation to mean there’s anything wrong with us or our relationship with God. We aren’t supposed to pray away the tempting voice of Satan; we are supposed to resist it, and we’re told that in resisting that voice it will flee from us. But then we’re told it will return again later to tempt us again. Nothing has gone wrong if we’re tempted and we aren’t supposed to try to pray away all temptation. Rather the answer given is to pray for strength to resist the temptations that Satan will send us throughout our lives.

Demon Voices From Psychosis Do Not Flee for a Time When Resisted
However, with the person experiencing psychosis they will tell you the demon voices do not fit this pattern where if you resist the temptation they go away for a time. During a psychotic episode I had in 2005, I heard demonic voices screaming at me 24/7, all through the night and day. They told me they were going to kill me. I tried to pray them away, called up pastors and had them pray for me, resisted anything I thought was evil, and yet the voices kept coming. I could only sleep 3 hours per night the voices were so loud and I also had extreme anxiety that made it almost impossible to sleep.

If these had been real demons, they would have fled when I resisted their temptations and prayed to God and had others pray for me. Real demons always flee when a person resists them in Christ’s strength.

Satan Doesn’t Usually Let People Know it’s Him When He Temps People; This is Not Usually His First-Line Strategy

Another important thing to keep in mind is that usually when Satan tempts someone, he doesn’t let them know it’s him. He tries to come to people in the most deceptive way possible, introducing temptations in a way where you think it was your idea to engage in the immoral action you’re being tempted with.

In false religions, demons may appear to people in visions or communications, but they rarely claim to be demons. They usually claim to be ascended masters, or holy angels, or deceased loved ones, or gods and deities.

Satan rarely comes to people and says “Hey it’s me; I want you to kill yourself and here are my arguments as to why you should do it.”

However, this isn’t to say that demons will never disclose themselves for who they are. We know from the scriptures that demons at the time of Christ revealed themselves to be demons on more than one occasion.

“When he arrived at the other side in the region of the Gadarenes, two demon-possessed men coming from the tombs met him. They were so violent that no one could pass that way.

“What do you want with us, Son of God?” they shouted. “Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time?”

The demons begged Jesus, “If you drive us out, send us into the herd of pigs.”

He said to them, “Go!” So they came out and went into the pigs, and the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and died in the water.”
Matthew 8:28-32

“Moreover, demons came out of many people, shouting, “You are the Son of God!” But he rebuked them and would not allow them to speak, because they knew he was the Messiah.”
Luke 4:41

The demons in these accounts let everyone know they were demons. Satan will do what he perceives to be advantageous to himself. He can take on the form of a snake or he can reveal himself to be who he really is, whichever he thinks will be most advantageous.

So if a loved one is hearing voices that claim to be demons or sound obviously demonic, it’s worth asking the question why would demons be so avert? And consider the possibility that maybe it’s not demons.

The Voices Are Nonsensical
One of the most important points to this discussion is that what loved ones don’t realize is that the voices are nonsensical. This is something the psychiatrist understands however, but unfortunately doctors don’t usually teach and inform the family, even if their loved one signed for them to have access to their records and to speak with doctors. There’s a huge lack of education.

The voices that communicate with them aren’t logical voices, directly going against Bible truth, and trying to get the person to disobey God. For instance, the demon voices that screamed at me for 3 weeks in 2005, and sounded just as audible as if there were people in the room with me screaming at me, screamed “We’re going to kill you before your prayers break Eminem out of the secret society he’s in! Before this wonderful thing comes to pass we’re going to kill you and give you a tragedy instead of the wonderful happy ending the Lord wants!” But the thing is I hadn’t really been communicating with Eminem through the Holy Spirit for the past couple years like I thought I’d been, and I wasn’t really praying Eminem out of a secret society of demon worshippers in the music industry that he was trapped in. In real life, he wasn’t trapped, and was choosing of his own volition to be a musician who made music about immoral themes. He could leave the music business at any time and stop releasing new records.

Some might give the argument “Well Satan can lie, so he could have invented this whole story about Eminem to get you to believe it.” But when Satan gives us false ideas we compare these ideas with the Word of God to check for accuracy and this is how we know they are lies. Every Christian has the ability to do this and the responsibility to do this. So why didn’t I question these beliefs? Why had I believed them whole-heartedly in a steady way for over 3 years? Because I didn’t even think to question them. I thought about these beliefs all the time, but for me they added up with the scriptures, because I’d lost the ability to be logical, and so I came to wrong conclusions when I studied the Bible.

The Bible is a logical book! And I learned this in a profound way after coming out of psychosis and seeing how I couldn’t understand its truths when my brain lost the ability to use logic.

These demon voices believed the same things I did, and had the same fault in adding up logic that I had. They weren’t demons; it was my own brain generating these voices.

The auditory centers of the brain can be over-activated due to inflammation, when a person is psychotic. During this break I had nerve zaps and very painful inflammation through my whole nervous system, including my brain.

The Temptations the Voices Give Have No Clear Motive and are Nonsensical
The “temptations” the demonic voices give aren’t things like “Tell a lie that paints you in a good light so you can get hired for this job.” Or, “Life is hard, you should kill yourself to escape all this crippling responsibility.”

No, what they are experiencing are things like “You are the chosen one who must save the world, and the only way to save the world is to jump off the roof; everyone’s life depends on you”, something no one in their right mind could be tempted by because there’s no one who would actually believe that. Or things like “You are a metaphor, and God is calling you to become a physical human being and the process of transformation is done by dying.”

There’s Lots of Other Nonsensical Chatter That Doesn’t Involve Suicide or Dark Themes Going on All the Time
There’s also a whole lot of other nonsensical “chatter” from the voices that don’t involve death or dying or violence. Things like “God is going to make you into a square today, so believe with all your heart so you can change in shape into a square because this is the shape people are in heaven and it’s your ideal form.” The person may shut themselves in their room all day praying to become a square and taking on their true form.

These are nonsensical things that break the laws of logic. The person may honestly believe it’s a good thing to take their own life, and may think they are doing the right thing by taking their life, may experience false guilt if they don’t do it. They can’t be convicted by God’s Holy Spirit if they lose their moral judgment, and so they can’t respond to conviction.

This is why psychosis is such a dangerous state for a person to be in.

For Something to be a Temptation, the Person Must be Able to Understand God’s Will From the Bible and Go Against His Will
For something to be a temptation, and for one to be said to be tempted, according to how the process of temptation works in the Bible, the person must be able to understand the temptation is a sin. If a person understands the difference between right and wrong, between God’s will and Word and things that go against His will and His Word, it’s only then that a person can give their informed consent to sin. They must be able to be convicted by God’s Holy Spirit not to sin, and be tempted by the devil at the same time, and use their will to make their choice. They can either call on God for help to resist the temptation, or they can give in to the temptation and grieve the Holy Spirit by doing the sin. If they give in, it’s then the Bible defines their action as sin.

“If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.”
James 4:17

This Bible principle is why animals are not said to have given in to temptation when they harm one another. When a lion has a strong impulse to kill and eat a gazelle, and carries out that impulse and kills the gazelle, we don’t say the devil tempted the lion to do that and the lion gave into the devil’s temptations.

We don’t call the lion ‘guilty’ and sentence him to a court hearing.

This is because the principle of what makes something a temptation and a sin is that the tempted one must have the ability to understand right from wrong, in order to consent to sin, or to consent to take hold of God’s help to resist sin.

But a person in full psychosis loses the ability to discern right from wrong. (Moral perception is not always lost if psychosis is mild.)

Our brain is responsible for all of our perceptions, including judgment and moral perception. Including our ability to understand the concept of sin, and differentiate sin from an obedient, holy action and choice.

While the eyes take in visuals, and the ears take in sound, these visuals and sound are interpreted and really “heard” and “seen” by the brain, not really the eyes and the ears. The eyes and ears are only transporters of the information, not processors or interpreters of the information, thus it’s our brain that gives us the experience of hearing and seeing, and what it feels like to exist in a certain environment and setting, and what it feels like to have a body in a physical world.

Auditory Centers of the Brain Can Generate Sounds, and Visual Centers Can Generate Moving Images On Their Own When Overstimulated
And then the memory auditory and visual files are stored in the brain. They can pop up if the brain is neuro-toxic, and a person can “hear” voices coming from their memory when no person is actually present, or “see” images of people, sometimes as realistic as if an actual person where standing in front of them, even when no other person is present.

These symptoms happen in cases of psychosis, when the auditory and visual centers of the brain are overstimulated due to inflammation.

So when family members think that because their loved one with psychosis is hearing voices, they must be real demons, they are not realizing the brain itself is capable of generating images and sounds all on its own.

The brain is a magnificent organ capable of great things. It is the handiwork of God. Our whole experience in this world is made possible by our brain, and subject to the errors and malfunctioning of our brain if our brain goes haywire. This is why people in psychosis cannot tell they are in psychosis; when our brain interprets and projects our reality a certain way, we’re limited by the interpretation. Being finite, we can’t see around our perception.

Going into psychosis can feel like having a spiritual awakening. One of the big reasons for this, is that when you’re slipping into psychosis, the science of the world and its systems changes. You look at a table, and the way you understand matter and what matter is has changed. Many of the perceptions we use to understand the world around us we can’t put into words and we aren’t even aware of. When these perceptions start getting reconnected in a different way, we suddenly become very aware of all the different perceptions and the amazing capabilities of the brain as it interprets concepts in science, both seen and unseen things like radio waves, theological concepts like the nature of God.

We see from a first-hand perspective what perception entails, and become aware of parts of our perception that are often missed or taken for granted when we’re in our right mind and don’t study or think about perception at all.

Due to how intelligent the brain is, and seeing this first-hand, and also the increase in dopamine, adrenaline, and sometimes histamine that occurs during psychosis and causes the brain to work even faster than normal and be smarter in many ways, although psychotic at the same time, it’s common for the person in psychosis to conclude they are gaining supernatural abilities, or that God Himself is communicating with them, especially if they hear a voice that claims to be God or sounds like God.

Once again, the God-voice is as nonsensical as the demon voices that some people hear. I realized this immediately after coming out of psychosis with lithium in the hospital. The grand dreams and communications I had received, which had been very vivid and looked like blue-ray definition, could no longer fool me, because they were total and complete nonsense.

For instance, I had dreams and communications that I was the chosen one to use the gift of faith to open dimension portals and let angels into our world to fight off demons who were already here, and tip the war in God’s favor and bring about the Second Coming of Christ.

Once out of psychosis, I could see clearly this isn’t the gift of faith as described by the Bible, nor how it works, that both angels and demons were already in our world according to the Bible, and that angels could protect us and had this capability, and God sent them for this purpose, they didn’t need to be let into our world.

I could tell both the science and the theology was off completely and that it was just complete nonsense.

But when in psychosis, the psychotic person can’t tell this, and with the brain inflammation accessing new parts of their brain and bringing up images and information that they didn’t have access to before, It’s a common conclusion people in psychosis make that “There’s no way I’m this smart; God must be communicating with me, or giving me a supernatural ability I didn’t have before”

They can’t tell their brain is making wrong connections though. Psychosis gives them a symptom of unawareness called anosognosia, so they can’t see that their thought patterns are nonsensical and they are believing delusions.

God created our human brain with the ability to understand every category of information and science in our world. Even immaterial things like radio waves, even deep scientific truths like matter and how it’s really energy, and how space is really another dimension connected in relationship with time.

We can also understand spiritual realities. We don’t of course, understand as much as God does, and we have finite understanding, but we were actually created to be in the very Presence of God, and to understand what it’s possible for a person to understand about God Himself, the angels He created, and the other worlds and the nature of life in those worlds and other creations. So even though we’ve never been to those other worlds and creations of God, our brain was created with the capacity to understand those beings and creations.

When a person goes into psychosis, the parts of the brain responsible for understanding all of these amazing things – both spiritual and scientific – get rewired, and the neural circuitry is changed, so they perceive things out of alignment with reality.

What can happen then, is a person can believe they are God, because their brain is contemplating spiritual themes, but doing so in an illogical way, and coming to an illogical conclusion. The person can feel like they are in another realm, because all the perceptions involved in helping them understand their experience in space and time have been disrupted and wrongly connected. You can have the wrong perception of what time is, and how time works. You can believe you are a metaphor, or that you’re a T Rex in the Triassic period and also yourself at the same time.

Due to the highly creative nature of psychosis, and the radical perceptual changes, some people have sought to induce the activation of these perceptions using hallucinogens like LSD and magic mushrooms. I don’t think this is the right route to take, and I believe this to be a sin, because they are knowingly and actively unbalancing their brain. I do think though that studying psychosis from people with psychotic illness who did not induce it or bring it onto themselves can be a way to understand perception and what the brain is capable of. It’s often the case that studying when things go wrong helps us understand what makes them go right and really understand all that is involved in accurate perception.

The Link Between Genius and Madness

Having the genes that contribute to the development of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders is not all bad. There’s a link between psychosis and creativity that has been known for a long time. It’s also true that people with psychotic disorders have a higher than average intelligence and tend to be very smart. There’s also a link between the mood changes that come with genes associated with mania, and productivity. Some of the people with the most successful and productive companies are not in full-blown mania but live in a state of hypomania (a less severe form of mania that is between the normal energy the typical person has, and full-blown mania).

Robert Schuman, the superb classical music composer of the romantic period, had psychosis. The mathematician John Nash had a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Van Gogh was thought to be psychotic. And there are too many others to mention. Some of the greatest contributors to the fields of science and to music and art were thought to have psychotic disorders, and one of my doctors told me that his patients who had the genes associated with bipolar and psychotic disorders, were among the movers and shakers of society.

The connection between genius and madness is not just a stereotype made up by society; it’s real and has been known in the medical and psychiatric communities for a long time.

I’m in schizoaffective and schizophrenia support groups online, and the creativity in there is amazing. Many of the people there draw strikingly gorgeous paintings and drawings. Many of them are gifted musically too. The typical schizophrenic is very skilled at something, if not multiple things.

Abram Hoffer, one of the first psychiatrists, and the founder of Orthomolecular psychiatry, who treated schizophrenics with high dose niacin and vitamin C, and brought many of them out of psychosis, loved his schizophrenic patients. He was continually impressed by them, and he helped many of them balance their bodies in a way that allowed them to function normally in society. I recommend reading his books for positive statements about the minds and personalities of people diagnosed with schizophrenia. I also recommend learning about the natural treatments he presents in his books.

Functional Medicine doctors often take the view that no set of genes are bad or good. They all have their weaknesses and strengths. The key is to balance your epigenetic expression so that you maximize the advantages of your genetics, and diminish and control the disadvantages. If you can do that, then the person can live a life where they aren’t out-of-control or completely disabled by their illness, and they can utilize their talents and skills to contribute to their families and communities and churches, and some people with treatments have recovered completely, especially when natural treatments and protocols are used, as natural protocols cause continued improvement over the months and years. Medication tends to reach its maximum effectiveness within weeks, sometimes months, but rarely continues to improve a person’s symptoms after that. Usually you reach a kind of controlled baseline and stay at that baseline after that without further improvement.

It’s very important that when you support a family member with schizophrenia or related syndromes, that you emphasize that they aren’t flawed biochemically beyond repair, and that their genetics aren’t just negative and bad, but that there are advantages to their unique genetics that can be maximized and will give them abilities that are unique and that not everyone else has.

It’s really important that the person suffering from a psychotic condition sees themselves as a whole person and not just their illness, and has avenues and outlets to use their giftings and abilities, and that their whole life doesn’t center around their condition. This builds morale, which is necessary for health and which helps provide the motivation to fight through health obstacles and commit to seeing doctors and doing treatments, and gives over-arching purpose to their life.

Logic and Faith The Basis of Christianity

It’s deeply upsetting when care takers of people in full psychosis ask me to pray God will sent the Holy Spirit to convict their psychotic family member of doing wrong by having wrong beliefs about God, or by sitting in the corner all day and neglecting Bible study and church attendance, and get them back on track with their relationship with God.

While a person going through other kinds of serious problems – say cancer – can pray and seek God, psychosis affects a person’s ability to understand God and the Bible, so you may see them praying to angels or praying to trees, or believing God doesn’t exist when prior to psychosis they had great faith, or cussing and not thinking it’s wrong, or engaging in promiscuity and thinking God’s Word supports it and allows it.

I finally found a way to explain in a short sentence why it’s so troubling when care takers and family members pray God will speak to and convict their family member in psychosis to return to Him. It’s because their request implies that Christianity and one’s relationship with God is based on something other than reason and faith.

Their Request Implies Christianity and One’s Relationship With God is Based on Something Other Than Reason and Faith

The truth is that reason and faith serve as the whole basis of the Christian faith. This what makes Christianity different from false religions; it is the truth, and the only kind of worship God accepts is willing worship, given out of an understanding and appreciation of His love for us. Reason is the core component of our humanity that makes us in God’s image. This isn’t to say other aspects of us aren’t in His image – our whole body and person is in His image – but this function of the human brain, this design built into our brain to reason is the most important part of our humanity.

He doesn’t want robots. He doesn’t want people who think He’s evil but worship Him anyway due to fear of Him. He doesn’t want people who worship Him to get favors and to be flattered by Him, and not out of love and reverence for His character. It’s Satan that wants those other kinds of worship, and these are principles on which his kingdom of darkness and evil is based.

An Even More Serious Problem
So I think there’s a huge lack of education and understanding about what schizophrenia is, and what psychosis is specifically, but sadly there’s an even more serious problem going on in society:

Sane people – people without mental conditions, the general populace – have not studied logic and reason, aren’t aware of what it is, aren’t making decisions and forming their beliefs based on it. It’s common for Christians, especially in charismatic Christian circles to think they have lost the Holy Spirit because they go through periods of time where they don’t feel God’s presence. Some of them conclude they must be lost and hopeless. The whole basis of their relationship was not truth and faith, but feelings. This is not Christianity. It’s building on sand, not on the eternal truths of God’s Word that can never be shaken or destroyed. (Hebrews 12:27-28, Matthew 24:34)


Sadly, logic courses were taken out of public schools a long time ago and never brought back. Logic is how you understand every other subject. It’s the basis for how to understand the scriptures. Indeed ‘understanding’ and ‘logic’ are basically synonymous when we’re talking about a human person and not a computer (a computer can be logical and not be said to understand, but in a being when we are logical it’s synonymous with us understanding something). And without a good grasp of the laws of logic, students will not be quick to see error and can fall for many fallacies, and swayed one way or the other, and their beliefs won’t be formed based on evidence and reason, but on quicksand.

(To read an excellent introductory book on Logic I recommend Jason Lisle’s – a Christian astrophysicist’s book – Introduction to Logic.)

What are the Laws of Logic?

When I say God is logical and all His Bible truths are based on the laws of logic, I’m not talking about human logic. I don’t mean human reasoning where because we aren’t familiar with something some people may lack faith in God and don’t believe it could have happened.

Some people have a very hard time believing God created the world in six literal days. It logically does follow that if God is omnipotent He could easily create the world in six days, in fact He could have created the world instantly, so the question that really arises is why did God create the world in six days and not instantly? But since some people lack the faith to believe God is that powerful, belief in evolution has been adopted by some people who take on the name Christian. They believe God started things in motion and then animals and humanity evolved from there over a period of millions of years.

They may then claim that it doesn’t make sense to their human reasoning that God could create the world in six days.

Or let’s say a hurricane blows through and devastates a city. A person may be unlikely to believe it was a judgment from God, and had a supernatural cause, because they’ve never seen God send an angel to stir up a hurricane. In their experience they’ve only seen natural causes – the laws of thermodynamics and physics create hurricanes.

This kind of reasoning where you assume the things that are most common in your every day experience are the likely cause or answer to why something happened, is called inductive reasoning. It’s an important skill to have, but it can be a lack of faith to use inductive reasoning in accounts the Bible tells us were actually miraculous. To not believe in that is clearly a lack of faith in God’s power, and desire to give us eternal life. For instance, to not believe Jesus became a man and was born of Mary, or that He resurrected and is in heaven, is to have a lack of faith. Someone may claim rationality and science as the basis for their conclusion that these events couldn’t have happened; but they aren’t being scientific at all; they are just doubting, and this is an issue of faith.

For the same omnipotent God of which the whole created world stands as a kind of footprint of evidence of Him, testifying to His omnipotent power and divinity, could certainly create a human body for Himself and come as our Savior and be resurrected after His victory on the cross.

Inductive reasoning is a skill but it’s not a law of logic. It’s not an absolute law, and can be factually wrong or show a lack of faith at times to use it. Rather inductive reasoning is really just a broad strokes way to make an educated guess, and is all about probability.

So what are the laws of logic?

The laws of logic are really two things, which are very closely related to one another:

1. They are the laws that govern reality and explain and make up truth.
2. They are the laws that govern thought and cause us to arrive at truth when we think.

The reason a cat in the real world around us is only a cat and not also a dog at the same time, is logic. The set-in-stone laws of logic, not just any kind of reasoning.

When you deduce that a cat is only a cat and can’t also be a dog, it’s because your brain is capable of understanding the laws of logic and using them to understand truth. Your brain can arrive at truth.

The laws of logic could also be called the laws of understanding. They are what we use when we understand. When we look at a cat and see it has different attributes from a dog, and thus can’t be a dog, or we read that Jesus is the only way to the Father, and conclude that since this is true there can’t be multiple ways to the Father, such as Jesus or pantheism, or Jesus and Buddhism, we are using the laws of logic – or understanding – and coming to truth by using them. We are understanding reality, both tangible concepts in the world around us that we can see and touch like the cat, and intangible, spiritual concepts like salvation, and how salvation works.

The laws of logic are what makes something true.

It would not be possible for truth to exist if there were no laws of logic, thus every time ‘truth’ is mentioned in the scriptures, the laws of logic are being referenced too as they are a core component of truth itself.

The 3 Laws of Logic

There are 3 main laws of logic.

The first is the law of non-contradiction, which states that if something is true, its opposite can’t also be true.

The second is the law of identity which states that a thing or concept is only itself.

And the third is the law of the excluded middle which states that for any given proposition or thing or truth, either the proposition (or thing or concept) is true, or its negation is true. There’s no middle ground or third possibility. For instance, I’m either dead or alive; I can’t be both alive and dead at the same time.

Logic is a component of truth. Because truth by nature is exclusionary, and by nature it has a set of definable attributes and properties. The 3 main laws of logic are what make something true. It isn’t just created things that have definable set properties, like the cat. But Bible truth – eternal abstract concepts – have a clear definition and set of properties that distinguish them from other things. For instance, even with abstract concepts such as right and wrong, stealing has a set definition. We can know when we’ve done the immoral action of stealing, and when we haven’t. An employer can know that when he purposefully withholds a paycheck to an employee who worked for that money, and puts it in his own pocket instead, that he’s stolen from the employee. Jealousy has a set definition and specific attributes. We can know when we’re being jealous and then we can surrender the jealous attitude to God to be changed by Him.

When I went into psychosis I lost the ability to understand any core Bible doctrine. I came to nonsensical conclusions about all of them. I learned first-hand that logic and truth is the foundation of every Bible doctrine. You can’t arrive at truth when your brain can’t make true connections.

Jesus calls Himself “The Truth.” The devil, His accuser and war enemy, is “a liar from the beginning.” If truth wasn’t exclusionary, didn’t have certain definable qualities, then it wouldn’t be possible to lie. What is lying? It’s when a person intentionally distorts the truth, adds in falsehoods that aren’t qualities of the truth, or leaves out vital components of truth and distorts it by omission. (It’s important to note that there’s always a selfish motive behind lying. To give incorrect information unknowingly doesn’t make someone a liar. To be in psychosis and tell people stealing is ok, because you can’t see that it’s wrong isn’t lying.)

If truth wasn’t logical, then anything could be truth, and it wouldn’t be possible to lie and distort the truth.

So the Bible gives us the basis for logic and it being a core component of truth.

What happens to someone in psychosis is that they lose the ability to tell a cat isn’t also a dog. They think a cat can be a cat and a dog at the same time. Or, maybe they believe they can be God and themselves at the same time. They lose their sense of self, their ability to correctly deduce the world around them, their ability to understand the scriptures, and their ability to arrive at truth.

It goes without saying that the laws of logic will always govern the created world and all of reality. So even if a psychotic person loses the ability to tell they aren’t God and themselves at once, clearly it’s true that they are just themselves and not God, no matter what they think or how confused they become. The world is logically coherent, even if people suffering with mental conditions aren’t. 

However, while the laws of logic are always in tact, and God Himself will never break them, the scientific laws God does break and go beyond. God can walk on water and break the laws of gravity and physics.

When God does this, it shows His divinity and gives Him glory.

Some people in their hatred for God have mocked Him saying “Can God create a rock too heavy for Him to lift? or Can God create a round square or a married bachelor?”

This is asking the question “Can God do things that break the laws of logic?”

I like C.S. Lewis’ response to this. He said miracles can be attributed to God but never nonsense. A married bachelor is just word play. It’s a logical impossibility. Because the definition and requirements to be a bachelor contradict the ones required to be married. The minute a bachelor gets married, he is no longer a bachelor and is instead a husband. He cannot be a husband and a bachelor at once.

I think you’ll be able to see here that the laws of logic are deeper than the laws of science. Jesus can walk on water and turn water into wine, breaking the laws of science, but He can’t make a round square or a married bachelor. Jesus could make a bush burn and not be consumed, breaking the laws of science and going beyond and outside of them, but He could not make a bush that was both burning and not burning at the same time.

The laws of logic are part of the Word of God. The Word that created the world and everything that exists. They are part of the eternal truth that goes deeper than mere created reality.

Why do we live in a universe that keeps the laws of logic – where a cat can’t be a dog and a cat at the same time, and married bachelors are an impossibility.

Because God is logical and the laws of logic come from His own nature. Before anything existed or was created, including the laws of science that govern our own bodies and every living thing in the world, God existed, and He is logical, both in thought, and in nature. For instance, Jesus is not also the Father. He is Jesus only. This is a law of logic stemming from the nature of God and the Godhead.

Like the moral law – the ten commandments – that are eternal because they exist in God, and God existed before any created thing came into being and He was good, the laws of logic are also eternal, existing in the nature of God.

His moral law is His character.
The laws of logic are His nature.

God, is infinite, does not exist in space and time, and thus laws of physics do not apply to Him or stem directly from His nature. Rather the laws of physics are created things. But the laws of logic do apply to God, and like the moral law He always keeps them and they are a part of Him, originating in Him.

While the Holy Spirit is omnipresent and does not exist in time and place and the laws of science do not apply to Him, laws of logic do apply to Him. For instance, the Holy Spirit is omnipotent, and has definable attributes and qualities in His nature. It can’t be said that the Holy Spirit is both omnipotent and finite possessing limited power. When we say He’s omnipotent, this excludes the possibility that He is also finite. The exclusive nature of the Holy Spirit’s attributes are part of the laws of logic, particularly the law of non-contradiction.

If the laws of logic did not apply to the Holy Spirit, then it could true that He’s both omnipotent and He’s not omnipotent and has only finite power. And that doesn’t make any sense and it doesn’t align with scripture at all. It strips the Holy Spirit of His divinity.

So even with an infinite God who is not limited to space, time, tangibility, or material matter, the laws of logic apply to Him and He’s never outside of the laws of logic, because these laws stem from His own nature and make up His own person.

So the reason it’s so upsetting when care takers ask for this is they are, probably unknowingly, asking God to operate on the principles of Satan’s kingdom; that God wants to make their kid believe in Him mindlessly, without understanding, as a dog obeys its master. God will not answer prayers like this. God is good and just.

To be clear, I don’t think they’re really meaning to ask this of God; they just aren’t reasoning through the belief they hold to its logical conclusion. But this is the logical conclusion of the belief, and it paints a tyrannical God who wants to force people to worship Him mindlessly.

But what does the Bible say about God?

I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my loving eye on you.

Do not be like the horse or the mule, which have no understanding but must be controlled by bit and bridle or they will not come to you.
Psalm 32:8-9

His way of dealing with us is instructing and teaching, functions that require reason and logic. The obedience and worship we offer Him must be given with logic and reason, because this is what love is. Love is a principle; and principles are understood with logic. This is why a dog’s love for its master is not the same as our love for God. The same dog will love and serve a criminal if a criminal happens to be its master, or it will love and serve a police officer who arrests criminals if a police officer happens to be its master.

The dog has only one goal: to obey and serve. It’s not discerning about the character of the master, and can just as readily be trained to steal and commit crimes as it can be trained to sniff out drugs and aid a police officer in catching criminals.

God asks us to be discerning, and love Him because He is good, from an intelligent knowledge of His character and His just law. This is what true faith and worship is. It’s done in spirit and in truth. With the heart and also with the understanding.

The Real Prayer That’s Needed

The prayer that is needed when you’re family member enters psychosis, is not for God to convict their conscience, as they do not have an operating conscious, but for God to restore sanity and the ability to reason to the psychotic family member. To heal their brain, and then cooperate with Him by giving the psychotic person care and medical treatments to reduce inflammation and help the brain regions to signal in a connected way, rather than the disconnected way that occurs in psychosis. This is an excellent prayer to pray, and the only one that really makes sense.

When care takers ask me to pray God will convict their family member of sin, I start to think that their own Christian faith and experience is not founded on reason and is founded on something less sure, something like emotions or inclination, and I become concerned for them, because a walk with God that is not founded on the truth of His Word can be shaken, and I know Satan will send them deceptions and temptations that will beat against their “house” as the parable says, and will be able to knock it down. It’s only “houses” built on the foundation of God’s Word that won’t be able to fall down when the storms of life get severe.

I wouldn’t want that kind of experience for anyone, where their religion and walk with God is based on emotions or inclination or suppositions and not on reason, and their faith falls apart when tested because it wasn’t on the only sure foundation.

Let’s really break this down…

Jesus is the truth. The Bible is His authoritative written Word, the source of truth. Truth is logical and reasonable. That’s how we know it’s truth. Logic is a core component of truth, so much so that if something is not logical it by definition cannot be and is not true.

When I lost the ability to be logical after I had a full psychotic break, I couldn’t understand the doctrines of the Bible. I learned after coming out of psychosis, why I couldn’t understand them and what was going on. It takes logic to understand every doctrine in the Bible. All of the Bible’s doctrines are logical and logic is the basis of them.

Faith is a choice we make based on reason, based on truth. Blind faith that is not based on reason is presumption, one of the principles of Satan’s kingdom and at odds with God’s principles.

Faith is not logic. Logic is the ability to understand God and His Word. Faith is the choice we make with our will when we decide to believe in Him and surrender our lives to Him.

As many intelligent atheists have unfortunately shown us, a person can have the ability to be very logical, and yet choose not to surrender their lives to God.

Logic is not surrender and faith. But it is needed in order to have a will and a choice. If someone’s brain has lost the capacity to understand logic, they can’t see and understand the goodness of God, the plan of salvation, and surrender their lives to Him. This is one of the biggest reasons why if we have a loved one who has slipped into psychosis – especially if we have reason to believe that loved one had not surrendered their lives to God prior to slipping into psychosis and was living in a state of rebellion towards God – we need to do everything in their power to get them effective treatment, so they can come out of psychosis, regain their understanding and the ability to have a working will, so they can have the opportunity to choose Christ.

If your loved one thinks Jesus is the Queen of England, how can they believe in Him? They can’t. If your loved one thinks evil is blue, and good is red, and has lost use of the neural pathways needed to understand the concept of sin and righteousness, how can they repent of their sins and trust in a Savior? They can’t.

Bringing them out of the psychosis is thus crucial to their salvation.

Faith and Presumption

“And that’s the way it was with us before Christ came. We were like children; we were slaves to the basic spiritual principles of this world.”
Galatians 4:3

Galatians 4:3 is often translated elemental spiritual forces’, or ‘elements of the world’, but if you go to the original Greek you’ll see the word here is actually ‘principles’. It’s saying before conversion you were held in bondage to be actuated by the principles of the world (world here means Satan’s kingdom), rather than the principles of God’s kingdom that actuate Him.

It’s principles that are the dividing line between God’s kingdom and Satan’s kingdom. God’s kingdom has the principle of love and self-sacrifice as its foundation; Satan’s kingdom has the principle of selfishness as its foundation and core make-up.

“If you have died with Christ, away from the principles of the world, why as if living in the world do you submit to decrees:
Colossians 2:20
Berean Literal Bible translation

This verse here in Colossians is often translated ‘rudiments of the world’ in the KJV, or ‘elemental spirits of the world’ in the ESV, but if you go to the original Greek, the word is ‘principles of the world’.

Once again, the Bible is telling us that when we are converted, we die to the principles that actuate Satan and his kingdom, and we are given a new heart that is actuated by the principles of love.

Love is a principle. It’s not a mindless choice. Let me explain…

Love and worship is a choice made with understanding. That’s the principle behind what makes something love. If you make a choice that is not based on understanding, it’s not love.

Faith works the same way. God’s principles – the ones at the foundation of His character, law, and kingdom – involve faith; Satan’s principles involve presumption. Just as a person with advanced dementia signing away their inheritance cannot sign a contract that holds up in court, because a just court would never accept such a contract and would punish the one who took advantage of the elderly person with dementia, so God’s court will not accept faith and worship that isn’t given from intelligent knowledge, with the person’s understanding. For God to accept such faith would be for God’s kingdom to be unjust; for His court to be corrupt.

But since Satan is corrupt, this is the kind of worship Satan desires and he will accept mindless, forced worship.

For instance, if someone were to believe in God without ever hearing anything about Him or reading His Word, knowing nothing about Him and His character of love, the Bible says this isn’t faith. Faith is a choice we make based on truth, based on God’s existence and His goodness. We choose to love and serve Him because He is a good and just God; the opposite of evil and selfishness; because He loved us enough to lay down His life for us, truths that require reason in order to be able to understand. We may not see Jesus in front of us, but we see the evidence of His creative works, which the Bible says is sufficient logical evidence of His existence, so much so that those who choose not to believe in the face of such overwhelming evidence are without excuse. 

“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”

Romans 1:20

We also have the witness of the Holy Spirit convicting our hearts of right and wrong. If we go to lie to our boss, the Holy Spirit convicts us lying is wrong and that we shouldn’t do it. This is as powerful a witness – if not more so – than God’s created works.

“They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.)”
Romans 2:15

But a person in full psychosis often loses the ability to tell right from wrong. Their brain loses moral perception, because moral perception is based on logic. And the person due to inflammation and neurotransmitter dysregulation and connectivity issues between important brain regions that can no longer effectively signal one another due to the psychosis, cannot understand logic, cannot understand truth. Cannot see the difference between the principles of selfishness and those of love, cannot choose to worship God.

Of course, they also can’t choose to rebel against God either or to be evil, since they can no longer discern the difference between good and evil. They exist in a morally innocent state, similar to a baby forming in the womb or someone in late state dementia who has lost the capacity to reason. Such a person isn’t evil and has done no wrong; they are innocent.

Whatever choice they made – whether for or against God – when they had their reasoning powers, is the choice God takes as their final choice. But of course if their brain can be treated and they regain their sanity, then their agency and choice can resume.

If a fully psychotic person were to choose to believe in God when they can’t reason that this choice wouldn’t count. This is also true of someone in late stage dementia. God is not unjust to count those choices as legitimate.

Human beings are made in God’s image, possessing reason and it’s through reason that they are able to make choices. Reason is not the will. The will – what we use to have faith – is when we choose to believe the truth that our mind already knows to be true because it’s added things up logically and sees Jesus is the Son of God, the Savior of the world. We use our will to repent of our sins and surrender to His Lordship in our lives.

But there is no use of the will possible – no ability to have choice – without reasoning ability. 

People in this condition are like little children or the elderly and need to be cared for and, if possible brought back into sanity with treatment, and it’s the job of the sane people in their families and in society to give them that treatment. God will give the families and the communities wisdom if they will recognize their important role and responsibility, and pray for His divine wisdom and help and depend on Him.

Mental Congruence Affected by the Fall

While our mind was created to be logical and to be congruent with the world around us, and there is a normal, healthy design and proper functioning of the brain, due to the fall we’ve seen a break-down of the human mind. I don’t believe this is only true of people with diagnosable mental illnesses. ‘Normal’ – the original mental normal that Adam and Eve had, doesn’t today fully exist in anyone, though some people are closer to it than others. 

There are times when a person in a good state of mental health becomes irrational and resorts to emotion to deduce truth rather than logic. I believe that our tendency – even in mentally healthy individuals – to be irrational and emotion-oriented over logic is probably due to the fall affecting our brain function and our characters. However, people do this knowing what the rational truth is.

I believe irrationality and logical inconsistency actually has it’s basis within the fundamental nature of sin. Satan, knowing he was a created being, refers to himself as a god and seeks worship that only makes sense for God to have. It isn’t rationality driving his beliefs here, it’s selfish ambition. So there is an element of delusion within selfishness. Anyone who is selfish treats others as less-than and adopts a superiority that really makes no sense. They know they are equal to others, yet they choose to see themselves as superior.

This is a kind of chosen delusion.

The Difference Between Spiritual and Mental Delusion

But sin leads to a chosen delusion, not a mental delusion. This is unlike delusion created by an inability to tell what things are from mental illness. That’s mental delusion and it’s not a moral failure on the part of the person suffering from this symptom. 

Sin is moral wrongdoing; it’s not a mental illness.

An example of a chosen delusion is the pope. It’s blasphemy for the pope to declare to be God on earth; it’s not blasphemy when someone with schizophrenia really believes they are God. The pope needs humility and a good Bible study and to be brought to repentance; the person with schizophrenia needs medical treatment to bring them out of the delusion. If you try to do a Bible study with them they won’t be able to deduce the logic from the scriptures and it won’t be helpful, since their mind is breaking the laws of logic due to mental illness.

Spiritual delusion is different from mental delusion, and it happens when the person knows right from wrong and chooses the lie and the sin anyway, and God then gives them over to be controlled and confused by a strong delusion. Knowledge of right and wrong must be present, or the person cannot choose the sin and God will not give them over to the delusion.

“They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.”

2 Thessalonians 2:10-12

“They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done.”

Romans 1:25-28

Those who choose sin do unnatural and logically inconsistent things (such as Satan a created angel accepting and demanding worship) that go against God’s created design. They also reach a point where they actually believe the delusion. Initially it’s a chosen delusion and they can tell right from wrong when they make their choice to embrace the lie, but once God gives them over to be deceived by the delusion, they lose their bearings on what is truth and become lost in the thick forest of deception.

It’s interesting that atheist scientists made great claims in America that they were the logical and rational ones, the ones who loved science and that Christianity was inconsistent with science. This lie has been unmasked in a marked way with the transgender movement. We now see that atheists are willing to deny and sacrifice even the most basic scientific knowledge for a purely philosophical belief that has no basis in science. They claimed to love science, but we can see they love their own human ideas more. It’s the Christians who love truth and worship their Creator who acknowledge science and truly love science and are scientifically and logically consistent. Here we see that love for God produces a proper respect and love for science and logic. This is because “All things were created for Him and by Him”, the “Him” being Christ. All things – and this includes science – are for Christ and find their proper bearings and place in relation to the worship of Christ, and if you take Christ out of the equation, then a person cannot truly love science or be honest about it or do it correctly for its intended purpose. There is an abuse of science that takes place when Christ is taken out of the picture. It is twisted to serve worship of self above God. Atheists may claim to love science, but they have become science deniers! 

Human beings have motives and a will. We can use our will to choose illogical ideologies if we believe they will serve some selfish purpose. An example of how our character can make us choose ideas that are illogical, is when Christians lack faith in God’s divinity and it causes them to embrace evolution, that I mentioned earlier in the book. Even though it’s nonsensical to believe a process that relies on death could be set in motion by God in a perfect world, if a person lacks the faith to believe God truly is omnipotent and can create a world in 6 days, they may default to the illogical belief due to lack of faith.

Satan fell from heaven for cherishing an immoral, and a completely illogical belief – that he was god. He knew he was a created being. He knew he couldn’t do the divine things God did. He knew God was in the right and He was in the wrong, that God was immortal and he was mortal. But he wanted to be a god so badly that he embraced a nonsensical philosophy and waged an entire war of evil vs. good against the true God. He knew he could never win the war, didn’t have truth on his side, but his love for being his own god was so strong he was stubbornly willing to wage it anyway.

Satan didn’t have a mental illness; he had a moral one – sin, particularly pride. So we can see that sin can lead people to believe and support things they know can’t be true. 

It’s actually the will that is the governing force in man. The will is the choice. And if our character is weak, it can be hard to make the choice to fall on our knees and pray for the moral strength to believe God is divine and omnipotent and that His Word is true about the creation of the world happening in 6 days. Satan will tempt the person to disbelief, and the person’s weak moral character will prove a temptation in itself, and the person must then make a choice.

The will is the choice and the individual decides whether to have faith in God or not; really he chooses whether to call God to His side to infuse him with strength or not (without God we can do nothing on our own). No one can make that choice for that person except the individual themselves.

Those in full psychosis cannot use the will, because logic is needed in order to discern morality. I believe it was C.S. Lewis who said without logic a person would just as willingly serve a tyrant as a benevolent God. To love and worship we need the ability to be logical, otherwise we’d just as easily worship a tyrant as we would a benevolent God and we can’t discern the difference and thus the worship given isn’t genuine or real.