as small as a world and as large as alone

7:16pm December 26, 2013

madeofpatterns:

slashmarks replied to your post“Do any of you know?”

I honestly am not sure, partially because I don’t think I’ve ever had this come up… I think if someone suspected what my impressions were delusions, which I have more often, I’d want them to just flat out ask and not dance around the subject. 

getting through the conversation would feel gaslighty, and trying to beat around the bush would feel patronizing. Mileage is likely to vary. But in general I don’t think it’s a good idea to bring stuff up if you aren’t someone’s designated reality©

check person *anyway* — I mean, it isn’t really any of your business otherwise to think you know better than they do. (god knows I’ve run into some people who don’t hallucinate that I disagreed strongly about reality with…)

What’s a delusion? How is it different from just being mistaken about something?

(Also, in the situation I was thinking of, someone was explicitly asking for my help figuring out what happened to something, so the possibility of it being a hallucination was actually relevant to what they were asking me.)

A delusion is when you’re convinced that something is real, when it’s not real.  Usually, it’s extremely extremely hard to convince you that it’s not real, even when you’re presented with huge huge huge huge huge amounts of evidence.

For instance, I had delusions when I was delirious a year and a half ago.  They were played into by hallucinations (this often happens) that the hospital staff were talking about me outside my door all the time.  The delusions were that they were all conspiring against me, that they were going to poison my IV, that they were telling each other I wasn’t sick and didn’t really need treatment, etc.

With delirium, delusions are often less severe than they are in psychosis. When people presented evidence to me that none of this was happening, then at first I didn’t believe them.  When one of my closest friends in the world told me flat-out “You’re delusional” (she’d been trying to be more gentle, but nothing short of that worked) then I at least sat up and took notice.  At first I still didn’t believe her, and required a lot of convincing.  Staff would actually take me around the hospital ward in a wheelchair any time I was hearing voices outside my door – they even told me I could hit the call button at any time so they could come in and do that.  They were so incredibly nice about it that that went a long way to convincing me they weren’t conspiring against me.

If I’d been psychotic, it likely would have been much more difficult to convince me I was delusional.  Psychotic people generally have more brain on the ball than delirious people, which weirdly makes it harder to break through to people that they’re delusional, because their brain is working against them recognizing that.  When you’re delirious there’s all these cracks people can get in through because your delusions aren’t as well-formed.  It’s much, much harder if you’re psychotic, generally speaking.  (But not always.  Especially if someone has gained your trust and you’ve learned to reality-check with them.  But sometimes it’s very very hard to trust people in that state.)

But one of the things that makes a delusion a delusion is that it’s associated with something not working right in your brain, and that it’s much harder to convince someone they’re mistaken than if they’re simply mistaken.  And delusions often make you incredibly suspicious of anyone trying to convince you you’re delusional.

Also… from experience, one thing about delusions that makes them so hard to get out of is they seem utterly and totally real.  Like they seem as real to you, as unquestionable, as if your computer is sitting in front of you right now and you’re typing on it.  Especially if accompanied by realistic hallucinations.  And also especially if real-life events can be tied into them in some way – for instance my delusions were triggered by an LNA who was abusing me, and the suggestions of someone near me that “it’s very easy to kill people in a hospital”.  It seems so utterly real and so utterly unquestionable at the time, that it goes against all your instincts to disbelieve it.

It’s definitely more than being mistaken though.

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