The thin line between Faith and Medicine

‘And Noah cried to his lord and said: My lord! Lo! My son is of my household! Surely Your promise is the Truth and You are the most Just of all judges. He said: O Noah! Lo! He is not of your household; He is of evil conduct, so ask not of Me that which you have no knowledge. I admonish you lest you be among the ignorant’ Quran Chapter 11, Verse 45-46.

Picture this: You are a man in your fifties with grown-up children, boys and girls. You have been identified as an upright citizen of your country. A morally upright man with ties to the community you live in. You may be a pastor or Imam of the neighbourhood church or mosque. You give out charity regularly and help the needy. Many people have benefited from your kindness and magnanimity. You are duly respected in your family and regarded as a pillar of firm support. You ensure that your children are being well trained both educationally and morally.

Then one day all that comes crashing down. Not because of anything you did, but because one of your sons comes to you with blasphemous allegations. He has renounced his faith. He questions the existence of God. He mocks your faith and challenges all that you believe in. In a deeply religious country like Nigeria, these allegations alone are enough to make a normotensive individual to develop a stroke.

You are shocked. All cannot be well and so you take your son to the hospital and demand that he be mentally evaluated. The psychiatrists have conflicting views. Some say he is well and in the absence of other symptoms, is just a young man with atheists’ belief. Others say he is delusional and say he suffers from a mental disorder. Mental disorders are not commonly diagnosed using an objective clinical test like blood work or imaging. They require deep psychological evaluation and scrutiny to make sure that the patient fits into a particular diagnostic criterion. Truth is, the diagnosis can also be highly subjective. What may be regarded as bipolar to one psychiatrist may be mistaken for schizoaffective disorder to another. Fortunately, the treatments are similar.

You are conflicted and dejected. Your son demands to be discharged from the hospital and goes ahead to involve human rights group. He is being held in the hospital against his will, he says. The hospital, not wanting to be associated with negative publicity, decides he is an adult and capable of making his own decisions, discharge him. He does not return home and in doing that, breaks your heart as a father.

This is the story of Mubarak’s father.

On the 5th of April, 2022, Mubarak Bala, the 37-year-old president of the Humanist Association of Nigeria, was sentenced to 24 years in prison by a high court in the northern state of Kano after being convicted of blaspheming Islam. He pleaded guilty to all 18 charges and asked for leniency. Mubarak has been in detention since 2020.

Mubarak Bala renounced his Islamic faith in 2014. The media wants us to believe that Mubarak was sentenced simply because he denied his faith but that is not the whole story. Following his denouncement, he went ahead to form the Humanist association of Nigeria made up of both Christians and Muslims who have given up on religion. Their believe that religion and science are fundamentally incompatible. They disagree profoundly on how we obtain knowledge of the world. Science is based observation and reasoning from observation. Religion assumes that human beings can access a deeper level of information that is not available by either observation or reason. They want proof of existence, they say, and in seeking that proof are willing to shake mighty tables in a largely conservative society.

It was not the fact that Mubarak renounced his faith, so much as the blasphemous utterances he continued to make on social media. We preach tolerance, yet the irony is that nobody is as intolerant as the atheist. They seek to undermine your belief at any opportunity and mock your God. It is as if they need to prove to you that you are wrong. They are constantly looking for attention and validation from others as if to say: ‘See us. We are right and you are wrong. We are believers in science. You are foolish. Can’t you see?’

Why can’t the atheist or humanist be tolerant? Why can’t they be quiet in their disbelief? Why do they insist on provoking the law? Freedom of speech, you say? What type of freedom is it when you continue to slander what people believe in??

My interest in Mubarak was not in his lack of religiosity. Indeed, there are many others like him, who have quietly stopped praying and lost faith in a supreme Deity. My interest was centred around the medicine in his case. Is it possible that he really is delusional? Or maybe has an undiagnosed psychiatric problem? How then we separate delusions from ideologies?

I have seen several people who come with conflicting thoughts about God. They are usually distraught patients who presentive with repetitive blasphemous thoughts in their mind. One young man I remember committed suicide because he could not reconcile the disturbing thoughts in his mind with his faith. Another woman came to me weeping. She was a catholic who had made several confessions in church. She had a rosary which she was constantly clutching, yet her mind kept pushing sacrilegious and offensive thoughts about Jesus Christ and his mother, Mary. She was crying to God all the time and begging for forgiveness. The psychiatrist diagnosed her with a severe form of Obsessive Disorder. She was placed on medication and her mind has since been silenced. The thoughts rarely come and she is at peace with herself again.

In mental health, there is the concept of Egosystonic and Egodystonia. Egosyntonic refers to the behaviors, values, and feelings that are in harmony with or acceptable to the needs and goals of the ego, or consistent with one’s ideal self-image. Egodystonia is the opposite, referring to thoughts and behaviors (dreams, compulsions, desires, etc.) that are in conflict, or dissonant, with the needs and goals of the ego, or, further, in conflict with a person’s ideal self-image. Simply put, if your thoughts and behaviours are not in conflict with your ideologies as a person, then you are termed as Ok.

Perhaps this was what influenced Mubarak’s lack of diagnosis. His thoughts are not in conflict with his beliefs. His mind is at peace and therefore he is deemed mentally sound. However, like in the case of the woman I earlier made reference to, her thoughts conflicted with her beliefs and caused her much anguish and therefore her thoughts were egodystonic. Egodystonia is usually a pointer to a mental health disorder.

The sentencing of Mubarak made me reflect on so many things: Science, medicine and religion. The belief that science and faith are mutually exclusive is not only wrong, but utterly misleading. Everyday, science continues to prove  to us that that religious duties and prohibitions are highly beneficial to humans. Today studies are proving the harmful effects of alcohol, and promoting intermittent fasting. Psychologists are promoting prayer as a form of meditation to calm the mind. What more proof do we need?

May we be guided to the right path, ameen.