When Doctors Call the Prophets Mad

Murray, Cunningham & Price · The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 2012 · American Psychiatric Association

Read this with your eyes open.

The paper opens with a man in his late twenties, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He told his doctors he could read minds, that for years he had heard voices revealing things about people he had never met, and that God had chosen him to guide mankind. The medication quieted the voices, so he stopped taking it. Then he asked the question the doctors could not answer: how do you know the voices are not real? How do you know I am not the Messiah? God and angels spoke to people in the Bible.

Three Harvard-affiliated doctors took that question seriously. Then they answered it the wrong way.

What this document is

This is a peer-reviewed paper from The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, written by three physicians out of McLean Hospital and Massachusetts General — neurologists and psychiatrists, Harvard Medical School. It is not prophetic. It does not believe in prophets. It believes in the DSM.

And it does something almost no clinical paper dares to do out loud. It takes Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Paul, and it runs each of them through the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia — auditory hallucinations, visual hallucinations, hyperreligiosity, grandiosity, delusions, paranoia — and concludes that their revelations may have been the symptoms of a psychotic disorder.

It even proposes a new diagnosis for them. A “supraphrenic” variant — a name for the kind of man who hears God and moves nations.

What the paper records

Read it the way this ministry reads everything — for what it records, not for what it concludes.

It records that as many as sixty percent of people diagnosed with schizophrenia believe they are a saint, a prophet, God, or the Messiah. It records that the experiences described in Scripture — the voice, the vision, the call, the sense of being chosen for a mission no one else can see — line up, point for point, with the symptoms doctors see in their offices every day.

It is honest about its own limits. It admits these are not medical records but ancient texts, written in another tongue, by authors with their own purposes. It admits a diagnosis on a patient never examined is on uncertain ground. It even says, in plain words, that its hope is to grow compassion for people living with mental illness.

Every symptom it lists is real. The voices are real. The visions are real. The men were real. On the evidence, the paper is right. It is the conclusion that is the lie.

What the paper concludes

From all of that honest evidence, the paper draws one conclusion: the prophets were not prophets. They were sick men whose illness happened to shape Western civilization.

That is not a new accusation. It is the oldest one there is. The world has always looked at a man who hears God and called him mad. When Paul stood and gave his defense, the governor Festus said it to his face.

Two thousand years later the charge is the same. Only now it has a journal, a citation, and a proposed line in the DSM. The robe has changed. The verdict has not.

What Scripture says about it

The paper assumes that if an experience cannot be measured in a clinic, it must be a malfunction of the brain. Scripture says there is a whole order of reality the clinic was never built to see — and that the man without the Spirit will always read the things of the Spirit as foolishness.

So the experience is not the question. The experience is real — the paper proves that better than any sermon could. The only question that has ever mattered is the one Scripture commands you to ask: whose voice is it?

The paper never reaches that question, because the paper does not believe there is anyone on the other end of the voice to test. That is the one thing its honest evidence cannot account for, and the one thing this ministry exists to say.

They wrote the symptoms down faithfully. They named the wrong perpetrator. Read it with your Bible open to Acts 26. The signs are all around us.