ReligiousDelusionsinasampleofinpatients in El-Abbassia Mental Health Hospital: Prevalence, Possible origin and Effect.

Abstract

Religious delusions demonstrate profound disturbance in self-image, in who I am and how I relate to the world. Actually, religious themes of delusions are some of the commonest in a variety of delusions. The prevalence of religious delusions varies widely not only with culture, gender and social class but also over time. Obviously, the content of delusions is influenced not only by the religious background but also by cultural and political particularities. Religious delusions exert a more pervasive influence on patients’ thought, affect and behaviour; Religious delusions may lead to violence. Aggression and homicide have been perpetrated by religiously deluded people. Patients with religious delusion presented a higher rate of psychopathology and, in particular, severer psychotic symptoms than other patients. Furthermore, they had a longer history of psychotic illness and had presented a worse global functioning during the last year before examination in the study. Presumably, their baseline conditions were poorer and their psychotic exacerbation was severer. In this study a randomly selected 500 cases of inpatients in Abbassyia Mental health hospital have been examined for assessing prevalence of religious delusions (Cross Sectional Stage). In this thesis ‘Religious delusions’ were defined as all delusional symptoms with religious content. These included everything from altered religious behaviour, altered practices/beliefs, to delusional themes of a religious nature. In addition, supernatural beliefs, persecution because of religion were included. Then a randomly selected 80 cases with religious delusions was compared to a randomly selected 80 cases without religious delusions as a control group using the following tools: • ICD-10 Symptom Checklist for mental disorders - version 1.1 (Janca et al., 1994). • Fahmy and El-Sherbini’s Social Classification Scale (Fahmy and El-Sherbini, 1988). • Family Socio-Economic Status (SES). • Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS), version 4.0. • Global Assessment of function (GAF) Scale. • Religious Orientation Scale (Al-Behairi and demerdash, 1988). • Brown Assessment of Beliefs Scale (BABS). All data gathered were recorded, tabulated and transferred on Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) for Windows, Version 20 (2012).