Studying the mechanisms of religious belief could lead to a better understanding of what goes on in the minds of people with psychiatric delusions.
An international conference in Sydney this week will hear that some religious beliefs – including that a virgin gave birth to the son of God – qualify as delusions.
Macquarie University PhD student Ryan McKay, who has been studying under one of Australia’s leading authorities on delusions, Max Coltheart, said the idea that religion was a delusion dated back to Sigmund Freud about 100 years ago.
To judge from this coverage in The Age, McKay’s take on the matter appears to be burdened by the assumption that there’s something abnormal about delusions which, by contagion, applies to religious beliefs if they are similar. But, in fact, as the headline says, it is religion which might be the model for delusion, not the other way around; we could turn the equation on its head — delusions are similar to religious beliefs, simply because they are both examples of strong, faithful belief. As for invoking Freud, while he did not take religious belief seriously, he was not as pejorative as this article suggests. His essay on the subject was called The Future of an Illusion — illusion, not delusion. There has been perennial debate about which symptoms are the cardinal features of a psychotic disease such as schizophrenia, i.e. direct manifestations of the neurobiological processes which are awry in the disease; and which are secondary, compensatory efforts on the part of the sufferer. I am a strong proponent of the idea that delusions are compensatory. To illustrate with an example, if you are beset by inexplicable and unberable paranoid feelings (primary symptom), you try to comfort yourself by making sense of your feelings, even if the sense you make is a delusional one like believing those people passing by on the street are CIA agents monitoring you because you hold a special key to the survival of the planet.
Beliefs we have generated to make sense of alarming and inexplicable experiences often persist long beyond the experiences themselves; belief is very tenacious. We like to believe we can rely on the sense our mind makes of things; it would be far more alarming if we could not even trust that. So even when a psychosis is successfully treated (e.g. with antipsychotic medication), compensatory delusions persist, even though the patient may start to realize others will find their beliefs odd or unacceptable and becomes more canny about divulging them. This fits with my clinical observation that medication never treats delusions directly, and that the disappearance of delusional thinking should not be a criterion for the success of medication treatment while the disappearance of, say, hallucinations or paranoia should be. (understand here, I’m making a distinction between paranoia, which is an experience, and persecutory beliefs, which are delusions. One can be paranoid without having elaborated it into persecutory delusions; and one can believe one is being persecuted without paranoid distress.) There are many other examples in clinical psychiatry of compensatory beliefs which persist after the stabilization of the symptoms they were meant to compensate for. People with panic disorder will do anything to avoid further panic attacks and may come to associate the onset of panic with visiting a specific location or, more generally, with going outside at all. They will often avoid these locations (anticipatory avoidance) or avoid going out at all (agoraphobia) long after medication treatment has successfully prevented further panic attacks. There is no altered neurobiology to a belief, psychotic or not. Belief change can only be effected, if at all, by slow gradual cognitive engagement. You can’t argue about religion…
Back to the article.
Many religious beliefs were triggered by a bizarre or unexplained “religious experience”, often produced by changes in brain activity.
For example, it had been shown that when Buddhist monks went into deep mediation and had a sense of “being at one with the world”, they also had decreased blood flow to the part of the brain responsible for concepts of the “self”.
The crux of delusion lay in the question of why these experiences triggered a religious belief system in some people but not in others, Mr McKay said.
“It’s as if the meditation causes a certain neuropsychological anomaly,” he said. “The idea is that you need some sort of second deficit, which means you’re unable to discard the impossible experience.”
This is in line with my point. Changes in brain activity may indeed produce altered experience but they do not directly cause religious beliefs. Religious belief may be the consequence of such profound experiences just as delusional belief may be the consequence of, but is not identical with, profoundly altered and distressing psychotic alterations of experience. My strong prediction — you’ll get nowhere trying to understand delusions by studying the physiology of devout religious belief, because there is no specific physiological alteration to be found in either phenomenon. The equation, or analogy, between religious devotion and delusional belief says more about the dynamics of belief than it does about psychopathology, psychosis, or neurophysiology.
