there's a lot to be said about how the average person indulges in delusions far more than anyone is really comfortable grappling with. every now and again, a poll comes out that reveals some sort of number of people who believe they have magical powers, usually pretty high, and everyone takes turns making fun of it and affirming their own Sanity
this is more observational than scientific, but it really does seem like writing off delusional thinking as the realm of the "insane" creates this valley where the "normal" person's thinking (especially a person who considers themself normal, but that's a whole other kettle of fish) must be more empirical, because, categorically, they are not insane
I betray a bit of a tendency towards criticising pop-psychiatry here, but I really don't think it's entirely fair to treat "hallucinations" and "delusions" as these incomprehensible eldritch states of the Other when the most stable person you know is a few nights of bad sleep and one day of unreturned phonecalls away from saying something that would qualify them for a pretty severe diagnosis
most people won't admit to having any kind of hallucination at all for fear of being locked up and yet the occasional weird fucking nighttime ones that you know aren't real are, to my knowledge, one of the most common and universal human experiences
there's an interesting thing I've noticed pretty often when someone first makes friends with schizophrenic people, which is that they undergo this period where they get anxious about whether or not they're a little schizophrenic (I'm guilty of doing this too) before either shutting down entirely or becoming more open to engaging with their own internal concept of sanity
it's so universal that it really brings into sharp focus just how much effort social norms encourage in rejecting everything that could make you seem even a little bit similar to groups that have been written off as morally defective, which makes them seem even more alien and incomprehensible in turn
you're only really allowed to acknowledge these experiences if you're making jokes about them, which I think is a big reason why shadow people and sleep paralysis demons are such an enduring topic of memes. you're only allowed to acknowledge you experience distressing sensory phenomena when it's part of a socially affirming in-joke
The vast majority of mental illness symptoms are completely typical functions and behaviours, but occurring frequently or severely enough to become a problem. They're not some Unique Thing Only Those Insane People Have.
yes I am always saying that.
mental illnesses are almost always "you do something that everyone does, but REALLY BAD or REALLY OFTEN"
like, ADHD: Basically every ADHD symptom is something that everyone does. fidgeting? having trouble focusing? getting distracted? hyperfocusing? time blindness?
Everyone does those from time to time and for one reason or another. We call it ADHD when you do it so much that it causes you problems, and it can't easily be fixed by things like "drink less coffee" or "get rid of distractions".
And the same goes for delusions and hallucinations. Everybody can get them, it's not a fundamentally different thing that only People With Delusion/Hallucination Disease get.
Yeah, and I'd add the way psychology and mental illness are stigmatized in global capitalist culture really doesn't help matters.
Like: I grew up in an environment where psychology was often discussed and treated as normal and, while that didn't SOLVE these issues for me, it did give me a non-judgemental, empirical frame-of-reference for explaining and managing them. X Hallucination or paranoid delusion may have been utterly believable and terrifying in the moment, but being able to say "that wasn't real, it was just my brain" helped me to process them non-destructively in the long term, and ultimately to learn how to control my immediate reactions to them. It certainly wasn't perfect or a cure, but compared to the Popular Media view of "you're broken and Wrong", or the superstitious view of "you're special and magic and god/demons is/are talking to you", it was certainly more beneficial.
