Quote:
Originally Posted by flylock shox
I can't believe this thread turned into another religion vs. atheism argument.
Schizophrenia, particularly paranoid schizophrenia, is characterized by powerful delusions and hallucinations. A person with schizophrenia isn't in a position to reason their way out of the disease because they're not in a mental state to distinguish the reasonable from the unreasonable. To a schizophrenic, delusions and hallucinations are as real as anything else. A God, or other figure, simply serves as a focal point for delusions, and an explanation for the inexplicable things which a schizophrenic experiences. Other powerful figures, such as the government, are also typical focal points.
I'm an atheist, but if I heard powerful voices in my head telling me to do things, and saw things that would have seemed impossible to me before, and I really believed those things were real because, to me, they were real, then I might believe it was God speaking to me because, frankly, that explanation is every bit as rational as any other explanation I might be able to come up with. Rational thought is not an option for people suffering from severe mental disorders, and choosing between religion and non-belief isn't something a schizophrenic can do in any rational way.
It's strange how few people are able to conceive of what it might be like to have a disease of the mind. We've seen that in several threads about depression and suicide before. Perhaps part of the difficulty is that so many people are used to thinking in terms of rationality and logic, and aren't particularly good at empathizing with others.
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I completely agree with you on this....however, we are talking about a man who was part of the military, got married, had a child and a fulltime job. Now I know people who have this disease, and I know they battle ALL of the time to keep things under control. These people have regular visits with the medical establishment to check their progress or lack thereof. Its the same when anyone has a disease...you fight like hell to maintain a form of normalcy...whatever that might be. So a married man fighting this disease with a wife who is supposedly normal.
In one of the articles it says this....
"Hagerman says it was his mission to kill his son, even though his wife, Shirley, begged him not to."
So then should the responsibility have fallen on the shoulders of his wife to either call the cops and report her husband, call the mans Doctor and report that his meds were not working, or simply grab the boy and run for the hills? If it were me there wouldnt be a hope in hell that anyone would hurt my kids without killing me first.
Hagerman also says...
....what he did makes sense to him, even though it may never make sense to anyone else.
"It was a hard decision for me to make because I knew that me doing it was going to cause me to lose my life," Hagerman said.
This means that he had been pondering the situation for some time. Based on the website posts and what he said to his wife it appears that it was certainly premeditated.
and finally Hagerman says...
He had no problem admitting what he did and why he did it.
Now Im no expert on this disease, not by a longshot, but those I know who battle it suggest that when they were delusional their memory of event(s) were clouded to say the least.
When asked during a jailhouse interview, " When you picked up the knife, what were you thinking you were going to do with it?" Hagerman responded, "I was going to end his life."
Sounds like his recall of the event after he was captured and put in jail is pretty clear.