The Three Christs Study: Strange, but True

The Three Christs of YpsilantiWhat happens when three Jesus’ (or men who believe themselves to be Jesus) meet in a mental hospital? It sounds like a bad joke, but in the 1960, one exceedingly curious and interesting psychologist actually performed an experiment in which three mental patients who all believed that they were Jesus Christ were forced to live together in the Ypsilanti State Hospital. The intention was to see if their beliefs about their identities would hold up after time.

Psychologist Milton Rokeach called the study “The Three Christs Study” and wrote a book entitled “The Three Christs of Ypsilanti” detailing the experiment, which he later called inhumane. According to this writer who was fortunate enough to get his hands on a copy of “The Three Christs of Ypsilanti”, Rokeach was more or less unsuccessful in any of his attempts to change the thinking of the three men.

As the article points out, Milton Rokeach’s breach of ethics in the Three Christs study wasn’t necessarily putting the three men together in the same institution or engaging them in conversations with one another, but was a little more sinister. He systematically manipulated the patients by having researchers write fake letters to each of the three men that were supposedly from significant people in their lives or a hospital administrator in one instance.  The letters implored the patients to modify their behaviors. Fortunately, the letters didn’t last too long, so it’s hard to say exactly how much harm was done. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to find fault with some of Rokeach’s methods in the study.

Throughout  the Three Christs study, all of the men argued together about their respective identities, but like many religious arguments, the result was the same; none of the men changed their opinions. Each of them remained firm in his belief that they were the one true lord and savior, Jesus Christ. Leon, who was one of the men, did  make one small change. He:

"ask(ed) to be addressed as "Dr Righteous Idealed Dung" instead of his previous moniker of "Dr Domino dominorum et Rex rexarum, Simplis Christianus Puer Mentalis Doctor, reincarnation of Jesus Christ of Nazareth".

In the end, Rokeach had little to say about the reasons for the men’s delusions (which are actually quite common in pyschotic patients) and attributed the cause to some Freudian ideas concerning sexual identity, which probably was not all that unusual thinking for that time.