Spirituality and Neurodiversity - Lent 2023: Day ten

"There is no such thing as a healthy person; there are merely undiagnosed diseases." 

"There is no such thing as a sane person; most of us are on the spectrum of one psychiatric disorder or another."

Harsh words.

Doctors diagnose a disease by looking for a set of associated symptoms; displaying some them raises the probability of having that disease. Psychiatrists do the same for psychiatric disorders, seeking symptoms in our behavioural traits or characteristics so that they can classify said disorder.

I asked ChatGPT to give me a ranking of psychiatric disorders; it came up with these:

Depression - 4.4% of the global population

Anxiety disorders - 3.8%

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) - 3.4%

Bipolar disorder - 1.3%

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) - around 1%

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) - 1.0%

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) - 1.0%

Schizophrenia - 0.3-0.7%

Not entirely trusting ChatGPT, I dug further, and found, for example, that the range of prevalence of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) goes up to 15% of the population! And then I read that "NPD may co-exist with the following mental disorders, including histrionic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, or paranoid personality disorder."

As I wrote a few weeks ago, psychiatry today is defining more and more spectrum disorders with a long tail. At the mild end of the spectrum, these disorders are not debilitating but are still present in sufficient measure to be noticeable in how we behave, showing up in our traits and our habits.  A majority of human beings would not meet the full diagnostic criteria for any psychiatric disorder, but many people may experience some degree of symptoms related to these disorders, indeed, multiple overlapping disorders (co-morbidities).

So - here we are, faced with a catalogue of disorders, which, it seems, are present in many of us to some degree or other, just waiting for a trick cyclist to tease them out during a therapy session!

My big question is this - how do neurological differences affect our spirituality? After all, they affect our social, cognitive and emotional functions. But our faith in a supreme being - or belief in the lack thereof? Our search for meaning and purpose in life? The relationship between our Consciousness and our Ego?

Example: a relationship between narcissistic personality and paranormal belief was discovered in a study involving the Australian Sheep-Goat Scale - "He/she believes in God because they are 'poor at reasoning'." 

Is this the case? 

This is what I'll be looking at over the next week.

Lent 2022: Day ten
Where was God in Auschwitz?

Lent 2021: Day ten
The Sins that cannot be Purged

Lent 2020: Day ten
Those who have created their own religion