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In Reply to: ahahahaha posted by Acheick on May 20, 2004 at 16:24:16:
I know lots of people with brain diseases who would never subscribe to The Family's delusional system.
That said, here's my best guess, off-the-cuff about Karen Zerby's brain disorder(s).
At the core of her behavior and beliefs about the nature of reality, there is a pathological level of anxiety. She controls through fear because she is consumed by fear. But her fear is not just fearful ideas or religious concepts.
This woman's central nervous system and her limbic system (a kind of neural netting that covers the outer layer of the brain and is responsible for emotional regulation) is in an absolutely wacked-out state of paranoid, hypervigilence. She always on guard, always defending against attack, always poised for flight or fight in a world she perceives as extremely hostile. The bioneurochemistry of anxiety is fairly well understood, although there are still a lot of unanswered questions about limbic system functioning.
It's kind of like this: If the "normal" state for the CNS is like a motor that runs at 50 RPMs, Zerby's motor runs at 3500 RPMs. If the "normal" limbic system is like a lamp that runs on 80 watts of energy to produce a steady light beam, her limbic system is a blinking light that's running on energy in a variable range of 800 to 1600 watts.
There's an obsessive-compulsive quality in her writing that is quite striking. She has to state things over and over again because she's never completely certain that she's covered her ground. Classic presentation of obsessive compulsive disorder are people who wash their hands dozens of times a day or continually obsess on an idea, like the belief they may have hit someone while driving a car. There are some medications that will control this sort of problem, btw.
Another thing about Zerby's brain should be painfully obvious: She isn't intellectually gifted. I'd estimate her IQ to be average at best, but she seems handicapped in some ways. She doesn't learn very quickly and she has never learned very much. It's like she can only learn by rote--repeating blocks of information over and over till she gets it--but she can't synthesize what she that information into knowledge. She reminds me of a parrot. Parrots can talk, but they can't carry on conversations about the meaning of life. She probably has a learning disability, which may be related to the pathological anxiety.
