The searching sun: the Lyeime Movement--crisis, tragic events and folie à deux in the Papua New Guinea highlands.

An historical crisis movement from the highlands of Papua New Guinea re-examined from a psychiatric point of view raises the possibility that the two leaders suffered from mental disorder. The principal prophet apparently had paranoid schizophrenia. As a middle-aged man he established the cult which spread rapidly in the Enga area in the 1940s at the time of first contact with outsiders. A surviving brother, who had also been an important figure in the movement, suffered a similar illness--an example of shared psychotic disorder or folie à deux.