SAMSON, who pulled down the Temple of Gaza and once killed 1,000 Philistines single-handedly, suffered from the earliest recorded case of antisocial personality disorder, a scientist has claimed.
|Diagnostic indicator: Rubens "Sam
SAMSON, who pulled down the Temple of Gaza and once killed 1,000 Philistines single-handedly, suffered from the earliest recorded case of antisocial personality disorder, a scientist has claimed.
|Diagnostic indicator: Rubens "Samson and Delilah"|
People with the disorder show at least three out of seven specific behaviours, such as being impulsive, reckless and habitually getting into fights. Eric Altschuler, a neuroscientist at the University of California at San Diego, said the story of Samson in the Old Testament showed that he had six of the seven behaviours listed in the standard manual of mental illness called DSM-IV.
He said: "It's almost as if the writer of the story has the DSM criteria tacked to the wall, and he is writing a sketch. But this was 3,000 years before the DSM." In the tale of Samson, detailed in the Book of Judges, he routinely got into fights. When he killed the 1,000 Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, he gloated over it, showing no remorse.
Samson also showed a reckless disregard for his own safety when he told Delilah