[inofindy]

I have, for various reasons, known a lot of schitzophrenics. From the outside, it looks to me like it's a person whose brain is, as noted earlier in the thread, in a semi-dream state. It's also been demonstrated that schitzophrenics lack the ability to understand context, which causes all kinds of problems.

A non-schitzophrenic sees Britney Spears on the news and knows that she's on the news, somewhere in Los Angeles, far from their own home. A schitzophrenic might see that same thing and be unable to tell that she's on the television, and think she's stalking them in their living room or similar.

A schitzophrenic can't easily discern between their own thoughts and the external world, and they often experience their own thoughts as being external (the "voices" telling them to do things, for example).

Schitzophrenia also has a demonstratable brain difference. The fissures in the brain are farther apart, thus increasing the distance that the brain chemicals and electrical impulses have to travel, and possibly this is why the messages get scrambled (they really don't know what the effect of the brain fissure thing is, but it has been seen and noted on various kinds of medical scans).

How can you tell the difference? Well, from the inside, you probably can't. It's rare that any schitzophrenic can tell that they're becoming delusional or having hallucinations. Perhaps after having had the disorder for a very long time you can start to train yourself to recognise certain signs, but generally speaking, that's very difficult. The part of your system that's in charge of telling you when something is wrong is the part that has something wrong so self-diagnosis is very hard.

Generally speaking, schitzophrenics have recognisable patterns of speech, a certain kind of tangental thinking that is very distinctive once you learn to recognise it, plus there are other signs that are fairly easy to recognise when you know what you're looking at (such as the inability to distinguish context). They also will (usually) respond to anti-psychotic drugs, at least to some extent.

On the subject of spiritual things causing signs that look like mental illness, yes, that happens, too. Mental health professionals certainly will think you're bipolar (happened to me) or schitzophrenic or something else in some kinds of situations, but a GOOD mental health professional understands that having "weird ideas" is not necessarily a sign of mental illness. Many perfectly sane and otherwise rational people believe in things that some people would consider very strange or even borderline delusional.