Personally I think one of the most obscene things about this damned illness is that it ruined my sense of the "spiritual".
Always had a very strong sense of that sort, especially after near death experience.
My own beliefs are a bit odd, and I find this line in the Gospel of St Thomas very important:
"Jesus said, "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, it is a wonder. But if spirit came into being because of the body, it is a wonder of wonders. Indeed, I am amazed at how this great wealth has made its home in this poverty."
I suspect that is literally true, that conscious minds caused what we think of as "God" to come into being (as a sort of zeitgeist of the consciousness of benign beings who had passed over), nor did God create the Universe as the spiritual and physical universes are completely separate.
So when we suffer illnesses that affect our consciousness, they interfere with our connection to the spiritual.
note that "consciousness" isn't purely the mind, it is more akin to "soul", the mind is the basic physical mechanisms as it were, where as consciousness is much more elaborate accumulation of who we are as people.