Baffling disease

It cannot be denied that medical science has made great progress in recent years. But likewise new diseases, such as AIDS and streptococcus (deadly flesh eating bacteria) which I read about in Time magazine dated June 20, 1994, have made history at the end of the twentieth century. However, I believe there is an illness which brings great and undescribable sorrow to a family: the illness of the mind called schizophrenia.

I know of many cases, whereby students of prestigious universities suddenly became depressed, their minds went blank as if he or she were in another world and they lost all interest in what was happening around them. I believe that this sickness baffles even the best of physicians in the medical world, because I know such patients who are incurable. Of course, people used to invent causes of such an illness, saying that the brain is overburdened by excessive study, others attribute it to black magic by someone who hates the family of the patient. But I have yet to hear of a plausible cause of such an illness.

In Jakarta's Menteng area, there is a man who wanders aimlessly in the neighborhood and people in Menteng regard him as someone who has lost his mind. One day he accosted me in Dutch and from the way he expressed himself, I take it that he enjoyed a good education and he must have come from an affluent family, but of late he is very careless with his appearance and his clothes appear to have lost contact with soap and water for a long time. Rumors have it that he was a mathematician gone crazy. Is it possible that a person can lose his mind by excessive study?

A. DJUANA

Jakarta