I am doing a Mental Health First Aid course at work ATM - yeah I know: blind giving map directions to the blind :-P Actually, as a mental health disorder sufferer myself, I seem to have a far better grasp on how to help others than one or two other people in the course who seem incapable of comprehending how any way of seeing the world other than their own way is even possible - and get uncomfortably aggressive about it! Most of my colleagues there are great though.
Anyway, this week we covered (amongst several other things) disorders that manifest symptoms including delusion. The teacher was very careful (and the class too mindful of political correctness requirements) to skirt around the fact that all the attributes of delusion apply rather neatly to most religeous figures in human culture.
Anyway, this got me thinking...
Where do we draw the line between delusion and not? Is someone who believes aliens are sending them messages really any more delusional than someone who thinks breeding samples of the entire animal biota of the Earth circa 4000 years ago could fit on a boat? We snigger behind our hands at people who are adamant that Elvis is still alive but not at people who believe a roman political agitator with decidedly communist views on social roles and the distribution of wealth came back from the dead are "normal"?
What, really, is the difference between someone who writes letters to Science magazine "proving" that the laws of thermodynamics are false, and someone using the same level of faulty maths+logic to argue that population growth is necessary for economic growth (an idea that has been soundly and repeatedly debunked by internationally reputable economists for decades). Other than that we vote for the latter because we haven't the wits or basic education to know better?
I think it comes down to a numbers games - delusion is when the belief is a minority, particularly a tiny minority. If a lot of people believe in the Great Sky Fairy, or in psudo-economics, they are not "delusional". Or if they are rich and powerful. To paraphrase the antagonist from the movie Speed, "The poor/powerless are crazy, the rich/powerful/influencial are eccentric!"
