First-person accounts of delusional activity
| Author | Excerpt |
|---|---|
| Chadwick17 | As my delusional system expanded and elaborated, it was as if I was not “thinking the delusion,” the delusion was “thinking me!” I was totally enslaved by the belief system. Almost anything at all happening around me seemed at least “relevant” and became, as Piaget would say, “assimilated” to it. Another way of putting things was that confirmation bias was massively amplified, everything confirmed and fitted the delusion, nothing discredited it. Indeed, the very capacity to notice and think of refutatory data and ideas was completely gone. |
| Chapman18 | I often misinterpreted real-life occurrences such as the behaviours of others as somehow related to those conspiring against me. When people passed by (police cruisers, door-to-door salespeople), I thought they must be there to spy on me. When I half-heard a conversation in the distance or the honking of a car, I would think it held special significance for me. I would randomly open a dictionary and find a word (“die,” “liar,” “evil”) and interpret how the word had special meaning for me. |
| Powell19 | After the first hospitalization, it was almost predictable that every 4 years my mother’s behaviour appeared to change in the fall … Although my mother tried desperately to recuperate from each psychotic episode and each arrest, she became increasingly reclusive and paranoid. Each episode was precipitated by an erotomanic delusion or delusions of persecution in the workplace that followed shortly after the psychiatrist decided to taper her antipsychotic medications. |