Which mental illness did Muhammad Have?

[Angrboda]

Assuming he existed for the moment. (I think it's more likely he existed than that Jesus did.) I don't first off see any necessary reason to assume he was in any way abnormal. People did this shit back then. A lot. Because it worked. And people still do it. Look at Joseph Smith. Is his story all that different? Yet there's no reason to suspect Smith was mentally ill.

However, I see a bigger problem. Even today, the bulk of the purely psychological mental illnesses are diagnosed based on self-reports. If you go to a psychiatrist and complain that your uncle is doing X, Y, and Z, and you want him committed, the doctor will want to talk to your uncle as his first touch stone in determining what is happening. Attempting to diagnose mental illness by reference to external behaviors, particularly external behaviors that are filtered through biased reporters and biased reporting procedures, such diagnosis is very dodgy business and has almost no scientific validity. Was Muhammed mentally ill? Possibly. But it's also consistent with his behavior that he was just a charlatan, or someone who just "liked fucking with other people" or even Min's hypothesis, a construct of myth and legend (which gets us back to biased reporting; what sieve do you use to extract actual behavior from any contaminating legendary embellishments?). It's fun speculating on these things, but at the end of the day, it's little more than the psychological equivalent of playing with a Ouije board.


As another example, at the Nizkor archives is an OSS psychological profile of Hitler which can make for interesting reading. Reading the profile, it seems probable to me that Hitler suffered some kind of affective disorder, bipolar or other, as he was prone to deep funks in later years (and his periods of manic energy probably need no elaboration). But beyond that, he seems very well adjusted. And because I have an illness with the features of an affective disorder, I may be reading more into it than is there. However, he was obviously quite productive and successful, well liked, especially by children and dogs. Charming. Smart. Rational. There's little to suggest he was in any sense personality disordered, least of all psyopathic or sociopathic. By my reading of the profile, he seems to have been just an ordinary, upstanding German gentleman, perhaps with a bipolar disorder, and a bit smarter and more insightful than most. I rather suspect, though, that you can find all sorts of "historical analyses" out there that claim to prove that Hitler had this, that, or the other dysfunction. Dodgy business, I say.