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Comment by ErikAugust | Hacker News Reader

I am fascinated as to why psychosis so often takes such a religious bend.

Purely speculatively, I would guess that is doesn't, naturally. But religious indoctrination is extremely common. So, it makes sense that if any given person is experiencing a mental break that there's a reasonably high chance they will have a religious background rife with grand concepts to pull from.

The one person I knew personally who broke with reality wasn't religious, and instead seemed to be pulling ideas from her previous goals and highlights of her life. She described a sort of ideal version of her life, the best things she could think of in the moment, regardless of consistency or reality. It makes sense that if one were raised in a religious household, one would talk about being chosen by God or some such instead of how you were getting straight A's in school and getting hired by 5 different places.

One prophet whom I will not name here initially believed to be possessed by the evil spirits but his wife, which had the monotheistic upbringing, made him believe it was an angel of the God. There's a touching scene where she makes him sit on her one and then another leg, and then she makes him sit on her lap and undresses. As the "images" he saw disappeared at that moment she "proved" him that it's not an evil but the "holy" power that possesses him.

She probably just wanted to calm him down and make him see the world more positive. Eventually it wasn't positive for his opponents and the world. He started to believe he has the direct connection with the God and that therefore anything he does, even the killings and tortures, were directly supported by the God. He turned out to be a "successful" prophet based on the impact he made.

I am by no means a religious expert but it's sad that your very reluctance to name the prophet in question made him easy to guess. And it led me down a bit of a rabbit hole:

https://wikiislam.net/wiki/Muhammad%27s_Just_In_Time_Revelat...

And on and on:

http://quotingislam.blogspot.co.at/2011/06/muhammad-orders-t...

Cultures experience mental illness in very very different ways.

http://news.stanford.edu/2014/07/16/voices-culture-luhrmann-...

People tend to think their talking to spiritual things in some sense, but Americans heard God, or angels or demons, Indians tended to hear from ancestors or kin, Ghanaians from various spirits. Indians and Ghanaian found that many voices where helpful and positive. The Americans all found their voices to be violent and negative.

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