Religion and schizophrenia

The relationship between religion and schizophrenia is of particular interest to psychiatrists because of the similarities between religious experiences and psychotic episodes. Religious experiences often involve reports of auditory and/or visual phenomena, which sounds seemingly similar to those with schizophrenia who also commonly report hallucinations and delusions. These symptoms may resemble the events found within a religious experience. However, the people who report these religious visual and audio hallucinations also claim to have not perceived them with their five senses, rather, they conclude these hallucinations were an entirely internal process. This differs from schizophrenia, where the person is unaware that their own thoughts or inner feelings are not happening outside of them. They report hearing, seeing, smelling, feeling, or tasting something that deludes them to believe it is real. They are unable to distinguish between reality and hallucinations because they experience these hallucinations with their bodily senses that leads them to perceive these events as happening outside of their mind. In general, religion has been found to have "both a protective and a risk increasing effect" for schizophrenia.

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