When does a person become a god?

A twenty-something reader doesn’t realize it, but there are books that will rattle around in his or her head into old age simply because of the title. Milton Rokeach’s “The Three Christs of Ypsilanti,” which I read 50 years ago, is one of mine.

“Three Christs” is strange enough. But then combine “Three Christs” with “Ypsilanti” — the name of a 19th century Greek patriot bestowed on a Michigan town — and you have a title that is a wonder. (Among those who have gone on to fame and fortune from Ypsilanti is rocker Iggy Pop.)

In the late 1950s, Ypsilanti, a city of maybe 21,000, was home to a large state mental hospital. With perhaps 4,000 patients, the Ypsilanti hospital was a community unto itself.

In 1959, Dr. Milton Rokeach brought together three men who claimed to be Jesus Christ — Clyde Benson, Joseph Cassel and Leon Gabor, all hospitalized for psychosis. Clyde and Joseph had been hospitalized most of 20 years, Leon five. (The biographies Rokeach reported were history, the names fictionalized.)

Rokeach and his staff were conducting a therapeutic experiment. How would three men who claimed to be the son of God — or God himself — respond to others making the same claim? How would they defend their identity?

The daily group meetings with the men, individual consultations and common tasks assigned to them, seem to have produced more experiment than therapy. Clyde and Joseph changed little. Leon seemed to be making healthy progress before relapsing in the two years the experiment and therapy lasted.

Psychosis. What does that mean? More specifically, for the three men, schizophrenia, which is characterized by withdrawal from reality, distorted thinking and delusions — among other terrible conditions.

To maintain the peace, the three Christs, after initial squabbles, ignored the others’ claims to godhood. Or belittled them. Leon repeated the phrase “That is your belief, sir,” when he heard a rival’s claim. And, apparently, in an attempt to reduce tension by not parading his godliness, Leon told the staff — and patients — to call him Dr. R.I. Dung or Dung. At one point, Dr. Dung wrote to the Virgin Mary asking for sandwiches and Banker’s Choice cigars.

To give you a flavor of how the men talked, here’s some of what Joseph told the group in a meeting. “It also states on my birth certificate that I am the reincarnation of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, and want to add this. I do salute the manliness of Jesus Christ ... and it so happens I was railroaded into this place because of prejudice and jealousy and duping that started before I was born ...”

“Railroaded?” Now there would be reformers, including Dr. Rokeach’s contemporary, psychiatrist Thomas Szaz (1920-2012), who would be open to agreeing with the charge of railroading. Szasz believed mental hospitals contained far too many people who were imprisoned for voicing alternate views of the universe — and unpopular views of their relationship with it. His major book is “The Myth of Mental Illness.”

There is no defensible reason for locking up someone simply for believing he or she is God — or a member of Henry Ford’s family. Apparently the Ford fantasy occurred in Michigan as well.

Leon, Joseph and Clyde were locked up not because of their beliefs but because they caused friction. If they had remained at home with an elderly parent or an adult child, if they had talked about Christ between listening to Detroit Tiger games on the radio and going to bed, they would not have been institutionalized.

When their families disintegrated through deaths or departures, the men became involved in scrapes with their remaining family, their neighbors, their community. When remaining family, neighbors, community could no further endure them, Ypsilanti here we come.

The group meetings, chaired by one of the Christs on a rotating basis, often produced comity. The Christs would sing a patriotic song or “Onward Christian Soldiers,” read well-known poems, and comment on newspaper stories. One day, they discussed a new drug, LSD, an emerging treatment for alcoholism.

After Joseph became sick and was admitted to the infirmary, Leon and Clyde picked flowers on the hospital grounds and delivered them to their bedridden comrade. All three also had modest jobs around their building — for example, cleaning the hallways.

Dr. Rokeach’s therapeutic experiment ended during the summer of 1961. By that time, Rokeach had uncomfortably concluded four men in Ypsilanti were claiming to be god — and he was the fourth. What right did he have to manipulate these men’s lives even in the name of medical science? The question still stands today.

Rokeach reached another conclusion that is as compelling today as it was 60 years ago. When does a man or woman become a god or goddess? When he can no longer live as human — when mortality becomes unbearable. To become a god, Rokeach concluded, the three men “gave up their group identities, their identification with family, religion, country and occupation” to wander through their tortured imagination with deities.

The Ypsilanti State Hospital closed in 1991.

Michael Carey is an occasional columnist and the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.

The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.