Link between philosophy/religion and mental illness?
I am diagnosed with bipolar disease and last year I had a major manic episode and ended up in the hospital. The strange thing is that I'm not religious at all, I've barely ever thought about religion and philosophy always frustrated me because I felt like I was going in circles. But in the weeks before I got in the hospital, I started thinking about philosophical and religious things obsessively. Some of them I know were bug nuts crazy, but some were actually kind of thought provoking. I started thinking about existence and all the different religions and started coming up with crazier and crazier theories about the world and the nature of existence and religon and stuff. Even after I recovered I was still feeling the need for religion in my life, which I never had before. This has since gone away completely.
I've heard many stories of other people who, in the process of going crazy, started thinking about religion or the nature of reality. Also, many people go crazy when they're in religion school. I was amazed when I went to support groups by how the people had similar delusions as me- for example, one girl I met felt like she was on a TV show while I thought I was a character in a book. Like we weren't real. And another one had "proven" in his head that we all didn't exist, which is eerie because I basically thought the same thing. I also remember thinking so much that I felt like I got to the point where everything was a paradox, that existence itself was a paradox. I don't remember what the reasoning behind that was, and now I try not to think about trippy stuff too much in the fear that I might go off the deep end again. Sometimes I feel like those thoughts caused my insanity, or at least my mental imbalance and thinking about those things fed off each other.
Does anyone have any thoughts on why this might be? I found it way too coincidental to not spark my interest.