Waldemar T. is convinced that he can walk through walls. Phillipa M. believes that she has six fingers, one of them invisible to others but visible to her. Orson L. thinks that in the year 2001 Earth will be destroyed in a collision with an enormous comet, that a great ark of space will be built that he will be one of its passengers, and that he will help set up a colony for humankind on Mars.
What do Waldemar, Phillipa and Orson all have in common? They suffer from delusions. A delusion is believing in something that most members of an individual's family or culture regard as irrational or false. One of the words used by ancient Greek writers to identify delusions was phantasia, and this is the root of our word "fantasy". A delusion may be regarded as a fantasy that is taken to be a reality.
In some cases, delusions seem to come and go without apparent rhyme or reason. As indicated above, Phillipa believes today that she has an invisible finger. Yesterday, she said that her head was made out of a pumpkin. Tomorrow, she may insist that she is only 2 inches tall. She is a hospitalized mental patient and suffers from schizophrenia. Her thinking is very disorganized and confused.
On the other hand, it is possible for an individual to have a highly organized, consistent delusional system. When this happens, a diagnosis of delusional disorder, also known as paranoid disorder, is made. An example of this kind of disorder is provided by a case history entitled "The Jet-propelled Couch", reported by the psychoanalyst Robert Lindner in his book The Fifty-Minute Hour. Kirk Allen, a physicist, believed that he led a dual existence. One existence was his mundane Earth life. In a second, more important existence, he was the lord of a planet in a distant universe. In this second existence, arrived at through telepathic means, he ruled an interplanetary empire and wore important robes of office. Kirk had accumulated 12000 pages of "records" documenting his role as a star king. Maps, charts, and biographical data were amazingly consistent.
A highly organized system such as Kirk's is relatively rare. Much more common are the more or less inconsistent delusions associated with such mental disorders as schizophrenia and organic mental syndromes.
Three common kinds of delusions are bizarre delusions, nihilistic delusions, and delusions of being controlled. Bizarre delusions are those that are ridiculous to most people -- Madge says that her eyes are made out of grapes, that her hair is cotton candy, and her ears are fashioned from leftover stew meat. Nihilistic delusions stress the themes of death and decay -- Sawyer says that he is a walking, talking corpse brought back to a sort of half-life by Dr. Frankenstein. Delusions of being controlled are characterized by the idea that external forces in the form of energies or persons are running one's thoughts and behaviour -- Tyrone has told his psychiatrist more than once that invisible wires held by the Puppet Master make him do things against his will.
Other signs and symptoms of Delusions frequently associated with the general symptom of a tendency to have delusions are :
- Irrational thinking
- Inability to use facts to modify the delusion
- Hallucinations
- Confabulation
- Distortions of body image
- Disorientation
- Magical thinking
- Distress
Disorientation suggests that the person is poorly oriented in time and space. Individuals displaying this condition may not know what day, month or year it is. They may not know where they live or how to find their way home.
Magical thinking is characterized by a tendency to ignore the importance of natural causes and their effects. Thus, a person thinks that an airplane flies because he or she wishes it into the air, or that it will stop raining because he or she turns counterclockwise three times.
Finally, it is important to realize that distress is commonly associated with delusions. There is a myth that mental patients are happy with their delusions, that they provide an escape into a pleasant fantasy world. This can, of course, be true in some cases. However, it is more common for a patient to feel tormented and controlled by delusions, which the patient perceives as real and as beyond the control of his or her will. Consequently, the patient often feels like a victim of the delusions.
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