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Cestus schreef:As a professional Psychiatrist you will encounter patients experiencing a wide variety of alarming and sometimes dangerous symptoms. Obviously this will become a routine endeavour on your part. You will develop the skills necessary to identify all the major mental illnesses and provide appropriate treatment. There is one principle, however, that will cause problems in many of these cases. If the patient is unwilling to admit they have a problem then it is practically impossible to provide effective treatment.
Such is always the case with the most prevalent of the mental illnesses today. I refer of course to the ‘religion complex’. Almost all of the sufferers of this debilitating disease are not only unaware that they are ill, they will actively defend their position, sometimes claiming that you, the psychiatrist, are at fault and they are perfectly balanced. Ridicule, violence, abuse: clearly you will be tempted to try all these things but it is important to be aware that there are functioning treatments for those deluded religious.
If the patient simply identifies with an imaginary being simply because they have been told about it their whole lives then clearly they are suffering from a mild neurosis. Weekly therapy sessions should be begun and mild tranquillisers should be administered.
If the patient believes that they have a personal relationship with the imaginary creature then more stern measures must be taken. While they remain placid they should be encouraged to place themselves voluntarily beyond society where they can do little harm to others. Should they resist incarceration then I recommend a long course of treatment with anti-psychotic medication and extensive therapeutic treatment, if necessary including electro-convulsive therapy.
If the patient has gone so far as to believe that the imaginary entity is issuing instructions and that it is in their best interest to obey then they are in the final and most dangerous phase of the illness. At once they must be removed from society, as they are a grave danger to all around them. Once incarcerated ECT should be started along with liberal doses of the most potent medication indicated for psychopathy. While this may resolve the issue in some cases, in most it will not. The patient has lost all higher brain function and is simply unable, not unwilling, to acknowledge the need for treatment.
Finally, only after months of other treatment I recommend pre-frontal lobotomy. As with all professional therapists, I have long believed that there was simply no excuse to lobotomise anyone for any reason, even if it does improve their quality of life. The loss of higher brain functions are too high a price to pay and the treatment has been rightly condemned as barbaric. In the tragic case of phase three religious, however, no higher brain activity is observable in the patient.
If the patient is unable to conduct logical thought in any case then lobotomy once again becomes a viable treatment. In those few cases I have studied, close friends and family members have been completely unable to identify a difference between the behaviour of the patient before and after lobotomy except for a loss of the overt symptoms of the illness.
I have also identified an astounding placebo effect on the immediate social circle of the patient following lobotomy. Religion is partly a genetic disorder, running most virulently in families, though it can strike at any time. Following the lobotomy of a single sufferer in each family, symptoms amongst other members of the family appear to be dramatically reduced and those other patients are much more willing to seek treatment early in order to prevent the appearance of more dramatic symptoms.
My researches so far have, by necessity, been conducted in countries not normally known for their quality of medical provision, however I feel that the data I have been able to gather should prove that there is now a treatment for this hitherto under diagnosed disorder. My assistant has been most effective in carrying out these researches and will shortly be publishing his doctoral thesis on an even more radical treatment for the most serious cases. I do not wish to steal his thunder but I must state that I feel his work has been diligent and offer my best wishes for his success in the future, both with psychiatry and will his new electrical device company.
source: http://uktech.wordpress.com/2003/05/01/ ... -religion/
