” . . . LDS historian Richard Bushman acknowledges that Smith had “an extravagant personality with a lot of emotions,” which, in some cases, indicate an unbalanced mind.

But the Mormon leader also had lots of good friends who were “solid people” and a strong, loving relationship with his wife and children, says Bushman, chair of Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University. “He was very effective in building an organization and kept that up to the end of his life. I don’t think you can say this was a dysfunctional person.”

LDS physician Greg Smith, of Alberta, Canada, points to more indications he believes show that Smith was not mentally ill:

* Joseph Smith could dictate coherently–there is none of the “word salad” of schizophrenia or meandering gush of pseudo-complexity or pressure-of-ideas one sees in mania.
* He could orate and hold people’s attention for hours, leaving them feeling enlightened and convinced they had learned things they never had considered. The speech of severely mentally ill typically is somewhat devoid of content and tedious in the extreme, if not off-putting.
* The Mormon leader was compassionate and empathetic, could put himself into others’ minds and situation; none of these are characteristic of mental illness, which tends to turn people inward.
* He had many thing going on at once, keeping all the balls in the air; he didn’t get fixated as many mentally ill patients do.

None of this proves, of course, that claims to divine communication by . . . Smith . . . were legitimate. That’s for others to decide.”

“A teenager says God and Jesus appeared to him in a grove and told him to start a new Christian church. Another person claims the Almighty talks to him through lyrics when the radio dial reads “103.1,” which he says refers to God, known in scripture as the “Great I Am.”

A French girl gets messages from heaven to lead an army against the British, while a Utah woman thinks she is meant to have Jesus’ baby and 12 husbands.

Some of these figures were considered prophets and saints, while others were judged insane. The question is: How do you tell which is which?

For example, Brian David Mitchell, convicted Friday of kidnapping and raping Elizabeth Smart, insisted that God gave him license to do so, though his attorney argued he was mentally ill.

The main difference between a prophet and a psychopath, says Ralph Hood, who teaches psychology of religion at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, is “whether or not (they) can get followers.”

“The true story of Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) and his friendship with Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Fox)–a schizophrenic street musician whose illness masked his musical genius–this film traces an adult friendship’s uneven trajectory.”

That it does.

“What did the apostle Paul, Muhammad the prophet, Joan of Arc, and Gyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevshy have in common? All of them were intensely religious All of them had mystical visions. And some scientists now think all of them may have owed at least part of their intense feelings to temporal lobe epilepsy, a neurological disease that causes abnormal electrical firing in the limbic system. . . .

[Temporal lobe epileptics] are hyperreligious. The attend religious services twice a day, build shrines in their homes, and have long conversations with God. They give up their jobs and ignore their familieis to pursue their religious interests. They become zealots.”

“The temperature dropped into the teens the night Kelvin Black sat down in SLC and never got up again. At 39, the homeless man had slept outside for much of his life, but things were finally looking up. Since spring, he’d had his own room at an apartment complex for the formerly homeless, Palmer Court — though it took him a while to unfold the clean sheets and stop sleeping on the floor.

He should have been one of the success stories. Instead, Black died on the sidewalk about a block and a half from his new home on Dec. 4. Black, who suffered from alcoholism, didn’t follow his friends when they encouraged him to go back to Palmer Court on that bitterly cold night. He was among the 58 people — a new record — who died this year after struggling with homelessness.”