Delusions are a phenomenon that for decades has attracted the interest of psychiatrists and psychologists. After all, for a long time we have believed that we tend to analyze the information that comes to us through our senses in a rational way, and that if we fall into deception, it will be because our eyes or ears have betrayed us.

However, the existence of delusions shows that we can interpret things in a profoundly wrong way even when our senses provide us with perfectly reliable information.

Strange Delusions: Alterations in Interpreting Reality

Unlike what happens in hallucinations, in which alterations are perceived in the information perceived by the different senses of the body, in delusions what is strange and not very credible is the way in which ideas are organized , that is, the way in which reality is interpreted.

To understand this idea, there is nothing better than seeing some examples of the most curious and extreme delusions that are known in pathological cases.

Types of delusions (and their characteristics)

One way to classify delusions is to use the categories of non-pathological delusions and strange delusions . Here are some examples from the second category: delusions that are so strange that they go against what we know about reality and that are extremely unlikely to be believed even before their veracity has been tested.

1. Cotard’s syndrome

People with Cotard syndrome present one of the strangest delusions known: they believe they are dead , physically or spiritually. This delusion can take many forms: some people believe that they are literally rotting inside, while others simply believe that the plane of reality in which they live is that of the dead.

This type of delirium is usually accompanied by abulia, that is, the pathological absence of motivation or initiative. In the end, there is little that can be meaningful for someone who believes himself dead and somehow feels that he does not belong “in this world.

  • If you are interested in learning more about this syndrome, you can read more about it in this article.

2. Enemy Complex

People who manifest Enemy Complex hold the delusional idea that they are surrounded by enemies who seek an opportunity to hurt them physically, psychologically or symbolically. In this way, a good part of the actions of others will be interpreted as acts directed at oneself; scratching one’s nose can be a signal for another enemy to prepare to attack us, looking in our direction can be part of an espionage strategy, etc. This is a belief related to persecution mania.

3. Diffusion of thought

People who hold this form of delirium believe that their thoughts are audible to others , that is, that they produce sound waves that can be recorded by ears and by electronic devices just as any noise would. Of course, this delusional idea produces a great deal of frustration and anxiety, since it leads to “mind-policing” and self-censorship even though one does not have total control over what goes through one’s mind.

4. Thought Reading

In this type of strange delirium the person believes that others (or a part of people, regardless of whether they are near or far) can read his or her thoughts through a kind of telepathic contact. This belief is often translated into the appearance of rituals created to avoid that supposed reading of thoughts: repeating over and over again “protective words”, wrapping one’s head around something, etc.

5. Theft of thought

People who express this delusion believe that someone is stealing some ideas from them right after they are created. It is a feeling similar to the phenomenon of “having something on the tip of your tongue”, although in this case it is perceived as a process in stages: first the thought is created and then it disappears to go somewhere else that is unknown.

6. Insertion of thought

In this delirium, the belief is held that part of the thoughts that circulate in one’s head have been introduced into one’s own mind by an entity from another , in a similar way to what is proposed in the film Inception (in Spanish, “Origen”).

7. Capgras syndrome

One of the symptoms of this rare syndrome is the belief that someone important in our lives has been replaced by another person practically identical to the previous one. Patients with this strange delusion believe that only they are aware of the deception and that the impostor has managed to make everyone else unaware of the substitution.

Thus, although the person recognizes in the other person’s features the objective traits that serve to identify someone’s face, this information does not produce the normal emotional reaction.

  • If you want to know more about Capgras Syndrome, you can read this article.

8. Fregoli syndrome

This syndrome is associated with a type of delirium similar to the previous one. As in the cases of Capgras, here too there is a form of delusional false identification: in Fregoli Syndrome the person believes that all the others, or a good part of the people around him, are in fact a single character that is constantly changing in appearance. This belief easily leads to other delusional ideas based on the idea that someone is persecuting us.

9. Delirium of grandeur

People with delusions of grandeur sincerely believe that they have qualities that are far above what would be expected of a human being : the ability to make everyone happy, to always offer the best conversations in history, etc. Any action they take, however anecdotal or routine, will be seen by them as a great contribution to the community.

It is important to stress the fact that people with this kind of delusion really believe in their superior abilities, and that it is not a question of giving the best image of oneself to others by deliberately exaggerating positive traits.

10. Reduplicative Paramnesia

People with this kind of paramnesia believe that one place or landscape has been replaced by another , or that the same place is in two places at once. For example, someone who is visiting a new building in Madrid may believe that that place is actually the daycare center in Buenos Aires where I used to go during my first years of life.

  • An example of this strange delusion is the case explained in this article.

11. Control delirium

The person with control delirium believes that he is a kind of puppet in the hands of a superior force that controls him . This can be expressed by saying that there is someone who is possessing one’s own body, or that one is receiving a series of instructions telepathically and has an obligation to carry them out.

12. Delirium from The Truman Show

In the film The Truman Show, Jim Carrey plays a man who has been raised on a gigantic television set in the shape of a city, surrounded by cameras and actors who play a role, without him noticing. This work of fiction inspired the brothers Ian and Joel Gold, the former a philosopher and the latter a psychiatrist, who in 2008 used this name to describe cases of people who believed they were living in a televised fiction in which the only real character is them. This delirium presents characteristics of delirium of grandeur and persecution mania.

Bibliographic references:

  • American Psychiatric Association (APA). (2002). Manual Diagnosis and Statistics of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR .
  • Valiente, C. (2002): Hallucinations and delusions. Madrid: Síntesis.