What would be right answer?

Truly, which one have you picked?

Honest?

You need not say, just keep it in your mind. I can’t read your mind through this script, I assure you.

Alright now that you have let us see what the right answer is…none of the above. How strange, if it’s none of the above what’s the right answer? The answer is, always. We are an embodiment of delusions. Some take it to the extreme; some are able to strike the balance for an elongated period of time. At one point however, one will most likely lose his balance to manifest his delusions clearly to others. Until this point of time he has been smart enough to cover them up. What a game, as long as I make others believe in my moves

This is an extension over my experience on hallucinations and cognitive impairment.

What is delusion? (wiki): A delusion is a fixed belief that is either false, fanciful or derived from deception. In psychiatry, it is defined to be a belief that is pathological (the result of an illness or illness process) and is held despite evidence to the contrary.

Broad Kinds:

• Delusion of Control: This is a false belief that another person, group of people or external force controls ones thoughts, feelings or behavior. Eg. A very senior journalist in the industry severed relationship suddenly one evening with me because she thought I was controlling her thoughts. She was aware of my background in mind studies.
• Nihilistic Delusion: …Non existence of self or parts of self, others in the world. Eg. Occasionally I encounter followers of certain faiths bantering non-existence to assuage pain in oneself and others. This runs high in my family as well.
• Delusional Jealousy: Also called Othello Syndrome (Dr. Raj Persaud). A person believes his spouse is having an affair and therefore stalks a person that doesn’t exist. Spouse in the end is the obvious victim. Very often we read such cases in our beloved Times Of India; Wife slashed for adultery while the reader thinks ‘Thank God I don’t have any illicit relationship, I’m safe. Very likely the wife killed didn’t have one either.’
• Delusion of guilt or sin: Holding oneself responsible for some big disaster
• Delusion of reference: Seems to pick up cryptic signals from various places (newspapers, passing traffic)
• Erotomania: Belief that another person is in love with him/her
• Grandiose Delusion: Conviction about special powers, talents, abilities.
• Persecutory Delusion: There is some conspiracy going on against him/her
• Religious Delusion: Belief that he/she is God or has special spiritual powers
• Somatic Delusion: Belief that the body or a part of the body is diseased
• Delusional Parasitosis: Belief that they are infested with worms. Eg. There was a case where a woman I knew believed that there was a worm in her brain and that the worm entered when she was a kid and died there. The scan and x-ray reports said otherwise.

Do you think you fall in any of these?

I will talk about myself. When I was young and watched ‘Spiderman’ or ‘He-Man’ I certainly had Grandiose Delusions, Even now I have them and therefore my fascination for action movies.

There are three ways to enter these states of delusion:

1. Some sickness that induces a hallucination during which state any imagination in the brain becomes more believable during repeated exposure. I keep experiencing this part.

2. Any instrument (living or non-living) conveying or building up seeds for a delusion beyond which the delusion can pick up its own facts to build a believable story for the self. This can take years. Eg. TV serials/ unrealistic animations/video games can be major culprits building seeds in youngsters that can start blossoming at the right time. Beyond a few years it is difficult for the brain to distinguish between something that really happened and something that was fiction. And at the right moment a new story on delusion can start. Other mediums could be comic books, parents, school or a major unnatural circumstance like a war, epidemic, death, flood etc. Or religious congregations that drive away from reality. I keep experiencing this part time and again.

3. An accident that leaves a part of the nervous system impaired or cross connected

It will be difficult to point out what my delusions are unless someone spends time with me and aware of delusions as a phenomenon. I am blind to my delusions. This is an endless pitfall and awareness and acknowledgement is the only remedy. Prolonged delusion may give rise to schizophrenia, paraphrenia, bipolar disorder, psychotic depression and other psychotic cases. Each one of the conditions has its seed somewhere in the past.

Here are some living embodiments of living delusions around me all of them either shared their issues at some point of time or are now friends (while you read about the examples, think about where the seed could be.

(a)    He is so insecure that he covers it up with expensive car and gadgets in his circle. He never lets any talks drift to himself. [I am the only one he talks to openly]

(b)    He only drinks Bisleri. All other brands are infested and make him sick.

(c)    She can’t move in an elevator or an escalator. She breaks down at the mention of one.

(d)   He weighs One hundred ten kgs and doesn’t think there is a way out. He thinks he is responsible for his wife’s cancer as well.

(e)  He has the delusion of life being a waste, all people, everything. Incidentally he is also a genius at painting and arts.

(f)   Most important: My cousin committed suicide at the age of eighteen because he had the delusion that he wasn’t good enough for his father.

I can pick out a delusion in somebody if I get to spend some time with him/her and so can you about me. But more importantly what we need to be careful of is that sometimes these delusions push themselves into a far serious state in us. The only remedy is being open to them and accepting the fact that I as a human being am prone to delusion. A schizophrenic is not much different from me, only that his delusion went way further than mine.

Sometimes our bottled up delusion that we keep ignoring open up like Pandora’s box when we fall sick at an advanced age where the major input for the still active mind is past memories. These memories can do a ‘tandav’ dance to create some jumbled up picture with a story that never existed and with some past seed of delusion. It is tough to keep our active mind busy with work, not all people find retirement easy. Live now starts with television and ends with something worse. Like bacteria which took over me in the last two days (Fever-Life Possessed) and left me hallucinating, the worm Delusion has a happy breeding ground, planting one seed after another like unpasteurized milk. Like the contagious ones, the more time a delusion has spend in residence, in active state, more convincing the subject’s condition is. And more convincing his case is, more prone are the others are to contract the seed. There have been battles on one man’s delusional stand on politics, religion (still ongoing). That one seed could have been checked at some point of time, and the only person who could check it would have been he himself.

References:

Dr. Oliver Sacks

Dr. V.S. Ramachandran

Dr. Raj Persaud

wikipedia