EARLIER this year we reported that Samson, the celebrated Biblical strongman,
may have been the earliest known sufferer of antisocial personality disorder.
Now the neuroscientist behind that claim is back with a further revelation:
Ezekiel, the most zealous of all Old Testament prophets, suffered from temporal
lobe epilepsy
(see “Seized by God”).
Should we be surprised? Hardly. The number of officially recognised mental
and neurological conditions has exploded in the past 50 years. At the close of
the Second World War there were a couple of dozen. Now the psychiatrist’s bible,
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,…
