Doctors are supposed to take care of us and heal us. But there are times when they can be very cruel and insensitive, in the name of science.
It was 1959, and at the Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan, they had met three mentally ill who believed themselves to be Jesus Christ.
To the psychologist Milton rokeach, in charge of the sick, a perverse idea occurred to him: bring together in the same room these three schizophrenics who proclaimed themselves the only Son of God.
His intention seemed good: he thought that when these patients met other Jesus who affirmed the same, they would realize the reality, abandoning the idea that they were the Son of God.
As expected, the controversial psychological experiment did not go as expected, as the web tells us IFL Science!
The first meeting was very tense. Since each of them believed himself to be Jesus, they saw the other two as impostors, and blamed it in his face.
The patient Joseph screamed: “I am telling you that I am God! “, while Clyde assured that it was him. Leon was the only one who didn’t say anything in the whole session, but when he finished he called it “mental torture“.
Far from settling for this, the forced encounters were repeated for two years. At first they tried hard to convince the rest that they were impostors. There were insults, and even a fist fight.
They finally learned to ignore the problem and they did not talk about the subject. They even joked with each other about their others problems, like one of them pretending to be married.
But far from curing them, they reaffirmed their beliefs.
Leon thought that the other two were lesser gods, and even reincarnations of a famous pirate, and a king.
Joseph concluded that his rivals were mentally ill: “They are patients of a madhouse, and the fact that they are patients shows that they are crazy“.
Clyde believed that the other two were robots: “the machines in them speak. Take the machines out of them and they won’t talk at all. You cannot kill those with machines inside.“
The psychologist Milton Rokeach went so far as to write a book about the experiment, called The three Christs of Ypsilanti that is for sale on Amazon, in Spanish.
In one of the reissues, Milton Rokeach wrote a note of apology, recognizing that in reality he was the sick man who had believed himself a god with the ability to manipulate people: “While I had failed to cure the three Christs of their delusions, they had succeeded in curing mine: my delusion that God could change them by omnipotently and omnisciently rearranging and rearranging their daily lives.“.
One of the cruelest and most controversial experiments in the history of psychiatry, which should never have been carried out.