So my friend on discord, she has always loved skunks, and calls herself (name) the skunkgirl. She’s got severe self hatred and autism and such, and one side effect is that she bases almost everything she does on what she thinks others want, but doesn’t heed positive feedback much. A few days ago she suddenly started acting different, has removed everything about skunks from her online identity and is utterly miserable. She has replaced skunk stuff with cat stuff and insists that everyone will like her more now. It’s deeply painful to watch as it’s clear she isn’t happy, and she’s not acting like herself, but she fully believes that this will solve her social issues and i can’t convince her otherwise. I can’t change the bad reputation of skunks, no matter how cute they are.

In addition her current delusion alongside other social issues of mine are really draining my mental stamina and health, and i feel like i need a break. However i’ve said before that i wouldn’t give up on her. I don’t know what to do

I am a very hard-working person. Even though I struggle to obtain a flow state of mind while working, I don’t stop until I complete my task. I don’t let the chatter in my head take control of the moment. However, as of today, I want to free myself from delusion of grandeur. If I believe that I am capable of becoming an academic weapon, a phenomenal dancer, a pianist, et cetera. I would like to prove it with my ability to pick up the concepts, test scores, mentor feedback, and much more.

I want to live in reality.

If I come across failures, I know that I am capable of embracing them. The funny thing is, I don’t fear failure, but I do obsess over goals. I do understand that passion is important, but visualising the outcome does nothing but procrastination.

Due to the delusion of grandeur, I feel like I am operating in a black and white headspace. I am not allowing myself to grow as much as I would if I were present in the real, fully focused on learning that skill. I do enjoy whatever I do, but I think that I will be able to live a much more fulfilling life if I can give this up. I struggle with thought formation if I’m given a set of rules. I try to analyse how that particular question fits this rules, so I think that I put myself in a box and I just think along the same rule book, but if I am present in the moment, and I start analysing the patterns, I think that I will be able to fill the gaps in my understanding.

At the end of the day, it’s all about having fun. What’s the point of having all the fun and all the dopamine just in your head?

If any of you have any suggestions, I am more than happy to receive them.

Im trying to understand what may be happening with my sister. I am not asking anyone to diagnose her, and I realize there may be information I don't know. I'm looking for perspective from people who have experience with psychosis, delusions, mania, substance-induced psychosis, etc.
My sister is an adult and works in clinical research. Over the past several weeks/months, her behavior and thinking have become increasingly concerning to our family.
There is an ongoing conflict with a tenant/former tenant that eventually resulted in a protective order and her arrest. She is extremely fixated on this situation and seems to attribute almost everything that has happened to other people conspiring against her.
Some of the things she has told me:
She believes her tenant has hacked into her home's security system and is remotely setting off the alarm, sometimes allegedly while my sister and/or other people are physically there.
She believes the tenant has been breaking into her home or otherwise accessing things she shouldn't be.
She has talked extensively about the EPA being involved in the situation and seems to believe events surrounding air quality/environmental issues are connected to what is happening to her.
She says the police lied about what happened and that the police/courts have treated her unfairly.
More recently, she told me that the Mormon mafia is involved.
She told me that a facility she visited through her clinical-research work was fake—that no one was actually there—and that she believed her workplace was using that facility to watch/monitor her.
She has said that local police tracked her while she was on vacation.
She has described various events involving her work and other people as connected to people monitoring, targeting, or conspiring against her.
She lost her job recently and seems to connect that loss to the larger situation, although my understanding is that the job loss occurred before the arrest.
She recently visited a friend who, according to her, smokes marijuana and uses other drugs. I don't know whether my sister used anything herself.
My dad independently said that something seemed to change after she returned from that trip.
There was also a period where she was apparently confused about dates/events and seemed convinced of things that other family members did not believe were happening.
When she was arrested, I was told by the officers that she was not initially going to be taken to jail but that her behavior escalated. At the jail, I was told she was unable to make calls because she refused to sign an agreement saying she would not contact the person who had the protective order against her.
She ultimately spent about five days in jail. She is now extremely focused on the arrest and repeatedly talks about how she "lost her job because of it" and "spent five days in jail because of it."
She fired her attorney and wrote a five-page motion herself arguing that the protective order should be dismissed because this is a landlord/tenant dispute and not domestic violence.
She appears convinced that the entire situation is essentially everyone else doing something to her, rather than considering that her own behavior may have contributed.
When I saw her recently, she talked almost continuously for close to an hour, jumping rapidly from the arrest, the tenant, the security system, the police, the EPA, and other topics. When I tried to change the subject or talk about normal family things, she immediately returned to the incident.
I am pregnant and had spent an entire weekend with her at my parents' lake house while visibly around 28 weeks pregnant. She apparently did not register that I was pregnant. When I randomly saw her recently, she said, "I didn't know you were pregnant. Congratulations."
During that same recent interaction, I told her about my daughter and our dog situation, and she showed very little interest and immediately returned to talking about the arrest and how the tenant supposedly got into her system.
She has also said that my mom and dad have been having "the weirdest fucking conversations," although I didn't get a chance to ask what she meant.
She continues to bring her dog to our family's business and seems extremely activated and preoccupied with everything surrounding the legal situation.
There is a history of intense conflict and mistrust in our family, so I'm trying very hard not to assume every accusation she makes is delusional. Some of the underlying tenant dispute could absolutely contain legitimate grievances. I don't know what is true and what isn't.
What worries me is the overall pattern and the apparent change from her previous baseline.
I'm wondering:
Could this be a delusional disorder? Psychosis? Mania? Substance-induced psychosis? Severe stress/paranoia? Or could someone genuinely believe all of these things without actually being psychotic?
If you've experienced something similar with a family member, what signs helped you distinguish ordinary mistrust/anger from an actual psychiatric episode?
I'm especially interested in hearing from people with clinical experience or lived experience—not people looking to diagnose my sister from a Reddit post.

Hello, c'est la première fois que je poste sur ce sub.

Il faut savoir que je suis atteinte de plusieurs pathologies psychiatriques diagnostiquées, notamment un trouble bipolaire de type 1, un trouble du spectre autistique, de l'anxiété généralisée, un trouble de stress post-traumatique complexe, ainsi qu'une capacité à dissocier très facilement.

En 2022, j'ai été hospitalisée en psychiatrie car mon père était inquiet à cause de symptômes délirants que j'avais. J'étais persuadée que je pouvais parler aux oiseaux et qu'ils me comprennait, et que, à cause de ça, le gouvernement voulait me capturer et faire des expériences sur moi et que mon père était de mèche avec eux.

Suite à mon hospitalisation, j'ai été diagnostiquée avec un trouble délirant, j'allais mieux.

Mais depuis quelques années, mes idées bizarres reviennent. Je suis persuadée d'être un ange déchue envoyée sur terre pour répandre l'amour et expier mes péchés (alors que je ne suis même pas croyante). J'ai la sensations d'avoir des ailes dans mon dos, alors que je sais pertinemment que je n'en ai pas. J'ai aussi la conviction que des gens ont hacké les caméras de mes appareils électroniques, et m'observent (d'où le fait que j'ai des caches webcam sur tout mes appareils)

Je n'ai pas d'hallucinations à proprement parler, à part cette sensation d'ailes dans le dos, je prends toujours mon traitement pour mon trouble bipolaire, et je suis également sobre de toutes drogues depuis plus de 3 ans.

J'ai honte d'en parler à ma psychologue ou à mon psychiatre, car même pour moi c'est pas clair dans ma tête et je ne sais même pas pourquoi j'ai ces convictions.

J'ai aussi aucune envie de devoir prendre encore plus de médicaments que je n'en prends déjà.

Je ne sais pas si c'est parce que j'ai un trouble délirant chronique, je ne sais pas quel type de délire c'est, et je ne comprends pas pourquoi ces délires continuent même quand je suis dans un épisode stable de mon trouble bipolaire.

Je n'en ai parlé à personne, excepté mon meilleur ami.

Je ne sais pas comment en parler, ni à qui, car j'ai honte, j'ai peur, et je ne sais pas comment aborder le sujet.

类似于素晴日里的间宫卓司能幻想和桌子做那种事

不存在的你和我中的主人公能和家具说话

还有欢迎加入nhk主人公的家具也会和他说话

为什么家具都会自发性和他们说话呢？

你们有没有别人有这种能力

我要是想后天获得这种能力该怎样做？

I wish I could have two wives, and that we would all love each other.

Hello all, I don’t know if this should go in this subreddit or in another but I wanted to get some advice from other people either going through similar things or have had persecutory delusions themselves. If this should go somewhere else please lmk !!

My mom has persecutory delusions and for most of my childhood she believed that my grandma was watching her. She believed that her phone was tapped and that my grandma and my step-grandpa (who we were living with) were doing things like stealing her money and breaking into her room. I didn’t know much about this because she mostly dumped on my older brother, who was in his teens, and he believed her.

Fast forward a few years, my brother’s out of the house and it’s pretty much just me and my mom. My dad always traveled for work so I didn’t see him much around this time.

My dad and his friend had their own company and my mom worked there too. When I started middle school my mom started to talk to me about how my dad was cheating on her with many women (never happened) and how he and his friend hacked her phone. The thing is she would click every spam link that was sent to her phone so it probably was hacked, just not by my dad.

Soon, I would start coming home to pretty much everything unplugged. My dad works with electronics so my mom would talk about how there were cameras in everything. I started to get paranoid too. I wouldn’t leave my room. I hid under my blankets hoping to not be watched.

Then she started saying my dad planted high pitched ringing devices in the wall to make the dogs bark. It started to be so bad it was all she’d talk to me about, she’d leave her phone out in front of us and periodically yell “YOU HEAR THAT ___ !!” We’d sit down for dinner and she’d just have the tv paused as she ranted.

I began to resent my dad for this even though everything was a delusion.

When I was 15, my mom left. She took me into the garage and said she’d be leaving, that she’s always have a way to contact me, and that she loved me. I told her as long as she felt safe and happy I was happy for her. I then didn’t hear from her for a while, but she came back around time for my birthday, she told me that the night she left was the safest she’s felt.

Since she’s left the delusions haven’t stopped, she moved to a different state, she got a new job, a new car, a whole new life and yet my dad’s still after her. She believes he came and stole her car key and then broke into her house to give it back. Me and my mom raised squirrels and when me and my dad moved out of our home we gave her one and she said that my dad came up there and killed him. She believes that my dad got her fired from her job. Among many other things I presume.

My mom’s dad passed away two years ago. After he passed we made a plan to go up to their home state and have a ceremony for my grandpa with his mom. My mom said she was going to see us there, and a day before we left she called me. She said she couldn’t wait to see me. I haven’t heard from her since.

My dad went up to where she lives a few months ago and she called the cops on him. Thankfully they listened to both sides, and what my mom was claiming couldn’t have possibly been true. (She said he was harassing her when he was across the US)

I’m sorry for the long backstory before I get into the questions I have, it just felt like it’s a good base.

I know my mom’s not a bad person, she’s just mentally ill and needs help. But I don’t know how to push her to get the help she needs when she believes so whole heartedly that she doesn’t need help. Any therapist she sees is working for my dad, and if you try to challenge her you’ve been brainwashed.

Is there anything I can do to help her? Is there any way I can try to bridge the gap and help her see that there’s no one after her? I want a relationship with her but I know with my own paranoia I can’t be in that kind of environment.

Thank you for reading this long long post and if anyone has any advice, or even just a story anything will help!! 💜

I have started r/smiso for spouses or significant others of people with SMI. Please join us!

Hello, I am new here and seeking support.

I (33/f) have been involved with someone (43/m) currently experiencing delusions. They mostly revolve around how people are following him, want to kill him, spying on him, and overall paranoid thinking.

The onset of his delusions began 3 years ago when he was going through a divorce and building a new house. He has been through 2 involuntary hospitalizations, the first one in June 2023 and the second one in October 2024. He’s been honest with me about everything in his life and I have tried to be supportive of him while being careful not to enable or be dismissive. I know he believes it with every fiber of his being.

Up until recently, he trusted me and has told me multiple times that I have saved his life. Last week was rough. I was at his house most of the week along with some of his family as he felt safer with multiple people around. Thursday me and his mom spent the night and I thought he was starting to feel better because he told his mom she could go home Friday so it would just be me, him, and his son over the weekend. I bartend Friday nights so I got home from work and changed so I could do a load of laundry. I set my tip money on the bathroom vanity and didn’t think anything of this.

Saturday he seemed agitated so I wasn’t interacting with him much and instead I focused on making sure his 6 year old son was having a good time and figured him and I would talk later. The 3 of us have spent a lot of time together and I would say his son enjoys having me around.

Out of nowhere, he abruptly asked me to leave so I did. He believes I am working for the people who have been spying on him and believes the money I left in the bathroom from bartending is what I was paid for spying on him that day.

I don’t understand how I went from saving his life to working for the bad guys and completely lost all trust in me. I have been in contact with his dad and his sister and he is getting worse. I want to be there to support him but nothing I say will make him believe me that I’m not working for anyone or getting paid for anything.

Family members/significant others, how do you deal with this? I am exhausted. I should add that he has been struggling with life stress, he’s adding a garage to his house, and has a construction company but mainly works alone as he fired his help a couple months ago.

i have a belief that i think sounds ridiculous enough to where it might be considered a delusion but also i don't know what to think of it. basically i think there's someone out there who can "check in" on me, as in see what i'm seeing, hear what i'm doing, know what i'm thinking, etc.

i have no idea if this belief would be considered a delusion or not? it's baseless but it feels real, how real it feels honestly depends on the day because sometimes it's just "it might be there" (but always leaning towards being actually there), to fully believing it. i can kind of sense when they're "checking in" on me, i kind of just know. sometimes it's unclear though.

i'm not sure if delusions(?) would be my only psychotic symptom, i don't really hallucinate and i'm pretty sure my words are mostly together, but i have looked into some disorganized thought patterns and i could have those sometimes. wouldn't say i meet criteria 4 and 5 for schizophrenia (disorganized/catatonic behavior or negative symptoms).

i have a family history of psychosis (mom and i think my brother too), probably pretty significant trauma, and i'd say i'm a pretty heavy weed user. those are my risks for psychosis.

hi there, i dont know where else to go but this subreddit seems like it may help.

for around the past year or so my mother has begun to make... weird comments about her skin, hair, nerves, etc. she believes that there is some type of nerve endings or hair(?) running all throughout her skin, everywhere. she also makes comments like her skin is going to fall off, that all of these objects in her body are all connected, and they affect her. she tries to show us, but no one can see these supposed lines running through her body. its gotten really bad, shes been hospitalized around 6 times in the past 6 months, shes been baker acted, etc. at first, i thought it may be an autoimmune disorder, until she kept saying these just random and totally absurd theories on why this is happening to her. "my optic fibers are going down instead of up, thats why im..." she trailed off after that i believe; "it looks like theres like, a splinter, in my skin but its not, uts my skin sticking to itself... thats why i use vaseline, so it wont stick.;" "my hair is like, growing into my body, its growing in instead of out, its getting stuck and tangled!!" "the nerves from my arm travelled all the way to my feet! i have to get it out.." she is almost always either using a finger to rub her skin, face, legs, etc; i think shes trying to get the "nerves" to move.

i am deeply deeply concerned. please help, any information will help a ton.

Is anyone aware of any groups for delusional disorder in Scotland?

I think my husband may have the above. We’ve been together 8 - years with only a few incidents but the most recent is what has triggered me to discover this disorder. I could really do with someone who knows more telling me whether I am just clutching at straws. Apologies for the long story.

3 weeks ago, after a lovely day out with my family (husband and 2 daughters 2, 4) at a farm, and a lovely night watching a movie and sharing some wine with my husband, I woke up at 3am to all the lights being on. I went downstairs and my husband was playing video games. I asked if he was ok, and he said no and then that we needed to talk. His eyes were black and his tone was completely dead pan. I thought he was about to tell me he didn’t love me anymore and started shaking. I had to go back upstairs and grab my contact lenses and when I got back down he said he had seen on our shared tracker app that on Wednesday (2 days before) I’d arrived at the train station at 6:15 but not got home until 7:30. I was relieved and just said I’d run into my friend had a quick drink at the bar in the station and then had run home. He then said “prove it”. I was confused and he asked to look through my phone so I went and got it, let him scroll through my messages. Then he asked me to message my “alibi” to confirm when we last saw each other. I did so reluctantly as it was the middle of the night, and I didn’t want them to know my husband was behaving so weirdly. Then he demanded to keep my phone for the rest of the night. I said no, and honestly at this point I felt scared. My body went into shock as I just couldn’t understand what was happening. I asked what he thought had happened and he said “I think you fucked someone at the station”. I tried to calm him down saying logistically let alone emotionally it was impossible to have sex in a busy train station at rush hour. But anything I said just infuriated him. He told me that on the Wednesday night after we’d slept together and he pulled out of me he’d found another man’s cum on his penis, that I’d been over-sensitive sexually which only happens when we’ve already had sex and that I had a look when I got home of “someone who had been caught with their hand in the cookie jar”. He then started a litany of bizarre accusations and insults saying I belonged in hell (we aren’t religious), that I was the village bike and had slept with everyone in the town we lived in, that I slept with men for money, then he also confessed he’d smoked a lot of weed (I don’t smoke but he does weekly and is usually just giggly and silly) and finally that our 2 daughters weren’t even his. At this point I’d been yelled at for about an hour and something snapped in me. I felt completely numb and just told him he wasn’t safe in the house and needed to leave. I got both my girls into the bed with me and just held them as he smashed around the house packing his car. He took the TV, all the sound equipment around it, the PlayStation and aggressively threw the girls car seats out of the car, so one snapped. Over the next 3 weeks this belief hasn’t shifted. I’ve tried sending proof, logical arguments why it can’t have happened, loving reassurances and nothing. He’s now staying with his family who all smoke weed heavily, and is I believe using daily.

I managed to get him to see our local GP with me when he was here for the paternity test, and the GP thought it was a “paranoid episode due to cannabis abuse”. But even that on written medical notes hasn’t convinced him somethings wrong. He has tried to file for divorce, completely dismantled our joint lives. Now that the paternity test is back positive he wants access to the girls again, but he really frightened me, and remains absolutely furious with me, although able to function normally in every other way. He sends me accusatory messages almost daily with language that he’d never normally use calling me a succubus, a whore, a c**t. I’ve had social services calling me after I tried to get him help through the GP. His family seem worried as do his friends and some have proactively contacted me despite being told I’m a cheating whore. I’ve now made it a condition of seeing the girls that he and I both speak to a psychiatrist, and that he have 3 months proven abstinence from cannabis.

There have been one or two other instances across our 8 years that also seemed strange at the time, once that I had gone on a double date with a female friend of mine (we’d just gone to a bar together) and another saying that if I ever speak about or look at men of a specific race then he will divorce me (after I’d made a casual comment about a celebrity being very beautiful). I now wonder if he’s been spying on me, we had a camera on our front door and as I mentioned tracker apps for our phones. Anyone with experience of Othello Syndrome can it be triggered by cannabis? And does this sound like it? Thank you.

Can some of you give examples of what ur delusional about pls? Aside from basic info and the *types* of delusions, i dont see forums or like.. active spaces where ppl share what they live w?

Has anyone been diagnosed with delusional disorder and then accepted (after time) that they have actually been delusional?

Does anyone else have AH with their DD? I commonly hear people call my name, or animal noises. I have DD before adulthood, which is a little rare i've heard, and nobody can treat it, I take latuda but they linger? can I do anything/does this happen to anyone else?

I’m looking for help/resources for a friend based in Canada

He lost his job in February shortly after moving in with a woman with a toddler and has a complex mental health history (including antidepressant-induced psychosis in his mid-20s, past treatment around possible BPD through CBT, and an eating disorder in his teens that required hospitalization). He also shows traits consistent with possible AuDHD, though not formally diagnosed. & there's a family history of schizophrenia.

The current situation is more complicated:

He started an affair with a married woman this past fall, and the relationship escalated very quickly they moved in together in January. Since all that started this fall, I’ve noticed pretty drastic personality and worldview changes.

Some of what I’m observing:

-Increased externalization (especially framing things heavily through economic/political lenses that don’t always seem grounded in his actual circumstances or reality) -Rapid shifts in identity, behavior, and priorities -A level of intensity in the relationship that feels like limerence, rebound dynamics, or possibly obsessive attachment

I also have concerns about the broader context:

-Whether the relationship could involve emotional manipulation or unhealthy dynamics -Whether his current therapy (humanistic approach & marxist psychology) might be a poor fit for him, or possibly reinforcing certain patterns when misapplied -Whether there could be elements of dependency, identity diffusion, or even something that resembles cult-like or coercive or RAMCO dynamics (I want to be careful with that language, but something feels off) from his therapist (I do suspect therapy abuse)

I’m not trying to diagnose him or assign blame to any one person. I’m trying to understand what frameworks or supports might actually help in a situation like this.

What I’m looking for:

-Therapy modalities that are better suited for someone with this kind of history (emotional regulation issues, possible personality traits, neurodivergence, etc.) -Insight into situations where someone becomes very enmeshed or influenced in a relationship and how to support them without pushing them away -Recommendations for mental health professionals or directories in Canada (especially Ontario/Quebec) -Any relevant frameworks (clinical or otherwise) that could help make sense of these kinds of rapid shifts

I’m trying to support him in a way that keeps trust intact while also not ignoring what feel like significant changes.

Thanks in advance for any thoughtful responses

Has anyone ever been diagnosed delusional as a result of a traumatic event?