• Psychotic “delusions” are more about holding certain genres of idea with a socially inappropriate amount of intensity and obsession than holding a false idea. Lots of non-psychotic people hold false beliefs (eg religious people). And, interestingly, it is absolutely possible to hold a true belief in a psychotic way.
• I have observed people during psychotic episodes get obsessed with the idea that social media was sending them personalized messages (quite true; targeted ads are real) or the idea that the nurses on the psych ward were lying to them (they were).
• Preoccupation with the revelation of secret knowledge, with one’s own importance, with mistrust of others’ motives, and with influencing others' thoughts or being influenced by other's thoughts, are classic psychotic themes.
  • And it can be a symptom of schizophrenia when someone’s mind gets disproportionately drawn to those themes. This is called being “paranoid” or “grandiose.”
  • But sometimes (and I suspect more often with more intelligent/self-aware people) the literal content of their paranoid or grandiose beliefs is true!
    • sometimes the truth really has been hidden!
    • sometimes people really are lying to you or trying to manipulate you!
    • sometimes you really are, in some ways, important! sometimes influential people really are paying attention to you!
    • of course people influence each others' thoughts -- not through telepathy but through communication!
  • a false psychotic-flavored thought is "they put a chip in my brain that controls my thoughts." a true psychotic-flavored thought is "Hollywood moviemakers are trying to promote progressive values in the public by implanting messages in their movies."
    • These thoughts can come from the same emotional drive, they are drawn from dwelling on the same theme of "anxiety that one's own thoughts are externally influenced", they are in a deep sense mere arbitrary verbal representations of a single mental phenomenon...
    • but if you take the content literally, then clearly one claim is true and one is false.
    • and a sufficiently smart/self-aware person will feel the "anxiety-about-mental-influence" experience, will search around for a thought that fits that vibe but is also true, and will come up with something a lot more credible than "they put a mind-control chip in my brain", but is fundamentally coming from the same motive.  
• There’s an analogous but easier to recognize thing with depression.
  • A depressed person’s mind is unusually drawn to obsessing over bad things. But this obviously doesn’t mean that no bad things are real or that no depressive’s depressing claims are true.
  • When a depressive literally believes they are already dead, we call that Cotard's Delusion, a severe form of psychotic depression. When they say "everybody hates me" we call it a mere "distorted thought". When they talk accurately about the heat death of the universe we call it "thermodynamics." But it's all coming from the same emotional place.
• In general, mental illnesses, and mental states generally, provide a "tropism" towards thoughts that fit with certain emotional/aesthetic vibes.
  • Depression makes you dwell on thoughts of futility and despair
  • Anxiety makes you dwell on thoughts of things that can go wrong
  • Mania makes you dwell on thoughts of yourself as powerful or on the extreme importance of whatever you're currently doing
  • Paranoid psychosis makes you dwell on thoughts of mistrust, secrets, and influencing/being influenced
• You can, to some extent, "filter" your thoughts (or the ones you publicly express) by insisting that they make sense. You still have a bias towards the emotional "vibe" you're disposed to gravitate towards; but maybe you don't let absurd claims through your filter even if they fit the vibe. Maybe you grudgingly admit the truth of things that don't fit the vibe but technically seem correct.
  • this does not mean that the underlying "tropism" or "bias" does not exist!!!
  • this does not mean that you believe things "only because they are true"!
  • in a certain sense, you are doing the exact same thing as the more overtly irrational person, just hiding it better!
    • the "bottom line" in terms of vibe has already been written, so it conveys no "updates" about the world
    • the "bottom line" in terms of details may still be informative because you're checking that part and it's flexible
• "He's not wrong but he's still crazy" is a valid reaction to someone who seems to have a mental-illness-shaped tropism to their preoccupations.
  • eg if every post he writes, on a variety of topics, is negative and gloomy, then maybe his conclusions say more about him than about the truth concerning the topic;
    • he might still be right about some details but you shouldn't update too far in the direction of "maybe I should be gloomy about this too"
  • Conversely, "this sounds like a classic crazy-person thought, but I still separately have to check whether it's true" is also a valid and important move to make (when the issue is important enough to you that the extra effort is worth it). 
    • Just because someone has a mental illness doesn't mean every word out of their mouth is false!
    • (and of course this assumption -- that "crazy" people never tell the truth -- drives a lot of psychiatric abuse.)

link: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/71kfTFGmK