I want your stories of your experience with ideas (or delusions) of reference. Are there events you have a hard time writing off as coincidence?

This message may or may not self-destruct a la Professor Gadget style...

Anyway...while my delusions in the past have been rather multi-faceted and inter-related, I'll relay one of my former, more hard-to-get-rid-of delusions. My dad, now retired, was a medical researcher for several decades. When the NIH really got hit with some severe budget cuts in the latter part of the 2000's, my dad got one of his last grants. Due to other thoughts/delusions percolating in my mind, I thought the only reason he got them was because of me...like I had some sort of prophetic mission to fulfill...like I was the reincarnation of Elijah or Enoch from the Biblical Old Testament. I told my sister about the former part of the delusion (not the biblical part), and she later told me she was freaked the fuck out...

My delusion was so fleshed out that no one could have convinced me otherwise. At the time I kinda knew something was wrong, but a quote from Franz Kafka really set me free..."There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction. One has to go abroad to find the home one has lost."

Basically, I had to give up any interest/study or hope in religion in order to set myself free. Since the instrument of thought was diseased (my brain), I had to rid myself of what helped catapult me into this illness: religious thought, religious guilt, heaven/hell...all of it. For me, religion became not just a spiritual but also a logical pursuit. My desire for absolute surety was what did me in. And I don't often quote G.K. Chesterton (an old Christian/Catholic apologist), but his words ring quite true in my case:

"Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."

In all honesty, I think it was my adherence to Kafka's message...to do away with the logic, the reason...and to focus on more artistic pursuits...that I was better able to come back to a place of mental wholeness. Granted, I will never be like I was before the onset of my illness, though in some ways I wouldn't want to. I've become vastly more compassionate than I otherwise would have been had I continued to be so starkly religious.

Anyway, the last thing I'll say in regards to my delusions is that they were frighteningly causal. My mind link one thing to another in a way that everything...every action of others and every experience to me had meaning. That is the horror of delusions...that everything has meaning.

I'll leave you with this...again, quoting G.K. Chesterton:

"The last thing that can be said of a lunatic is that his actions are causeless. If any human acts may loosely be called causeless, they are the minor acts of a healthy man ; whistling as he walks; slashing the grass with a stick ; kicking his heels or rubbing his hands. It is the happy man who does the useless things; the sick man is not strong enough to be idle. It is exactly such careless and causeless actions that the madman could never understand; for the madman (like the determinist) generally sees too much cause in everything. The madman would read a conspiratorial significance into those empty activities. He would think that the lopping of the grass was an attack on private property. He would think that the kicking of the heels was a signal to an accomplice. If the madman could for an instant become careless, he would become sane. Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."

/r/schizophrenia Thread