EARLIER this year we reported that Samson, the celebrated Biblical strongman,
may have been the earliest known sufferer of antisocial personality disorder.
Now the neuroscientist behind that claim is back with a further revelation:
Ezekiel, the most zealous of all Old Testament prophets, suffered from temporal
lobe epilepsy
(see 鈥淪eized by God鈥�).
Should we be surprised? Hardly. The number of officially recognised mental
and neurological conditions has exploded in the past 50 years. At the close of
the Second World War there were a couple of dozen. Now the psychiatrist鈥檚 bible,
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, lists some
400. The real challenge is finding a major Biblical character who did not suffer
from one. Salome鈥檚 eagerness to impress on the dance floor is almost a textbook
account of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Herod鈥檚 hasty order to slaughter
every newborn in the land is a classic symptom of Intermittent Explosive
Disorder. Moses, meanwhile, could easily qualify for Delusional Disorder of the
Grandiose Type, the key symptom of which, according to the manual, is 鈥渢he
delusion of having a special relationship with a prominent person鈥�.
In fact, the human condition is now so thoroughly medicalised that few people
can claim to be normal. With no sense of irony, psychiatrists even have a term,
Factitious Disorder, to describe people who suffer from made-up illnesses. Some
argue this disease invention is good because it takes some of the unhelpful
moralism out of our attitudes to problematic people. In truth it鈥檚 hard not to
see it as the self-interested work of therapists on hourly rates and drugs
companies for whom every newly minted illness is a lucrative market. Someone
should invent a word for it.
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