What is Schizophrenia?

They’re completely missing what actually happened.

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.

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 two 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.

It’s 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.

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.

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.

Psychosis affects a person’s core beliefs, not because they suddenly believe differently, 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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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. Now imagine that a specific individual person has 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. 

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 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.

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 stresses 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 delusions 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. 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.

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. 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 their judgment and 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 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 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 but it’s not the same). 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 or will be miraculous but haven’t happened yet, such as the resurrection. To not believe in that is clearly a lack of faith in God’s power, and desire to give us eternal life.

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 really the same thing:

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.

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. 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.

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. God will not answer prayers like this. God is good and just.

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 or will be miraculous but haven’t happened yet, such as the resurrection. To not believe in that is clearly a lack of faith in God’s power and desire to give us eternal life.

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 really the same thing:

1. They are the laws that govern reality and explain 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.

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.

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. 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.

The laws of logic can also be called the laws of understanding. Without the ability to reason, we cannot understand. And without understanding, we cannot worship, we cannot do a benevolent act or a malevolent one. We become like the animals.

This is the state someone in full psychosis is in, though always much more valuable than an animal. It’s our whole being that is in the image of God. So when I say a person in such a state becomes like an animal I mean they become incapable of good and evil, not that their value or worth as a person goes down. Their worth remains in tact and we should always treat them with the utmost dignity.

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. God will not answer prayers like this. God is good and just.

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.

For instance, it’s not true that Jesus is the way to the Father and there are also other ways to the Father and that both of these statements are true. That’s illogical and nonsensical and contradictory. When things contradict and are illogical they aren’t true. When Jesus says He is the only way to the Father, this excludes the possibility that there are also other ways to the Father. Truth is always exclusive. This fact is a law of logic.

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.

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. 

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.

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, 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

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 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.