Delusions and the Madness of the Masses

We all think that we can tell the difference between someone who is mad, or whom psychiatrists call psychotic, and someone who is sane. But can we really tell who is mad and who is not? Do we really know what madness is and how it should be recognized? Have psychiatrists made a sensible distinction between the patient who believes that aliens are beaming messages to him from a foreign planet, and the religious fanatic who believes God communicates to him via automatic writing? Is there a difference between the paranoid patient who believes that the FBI is after him, and the sizeable proportion of our normal population that believe that the US government orchestrated the 9-11 bombings? Here, Reznek hopes to shed light on the delusions of the masses-those delusions that are common to everyday people living so-called ordinary lives. He provides an understanding of madness and the psychological processes that drive us to adopt delusions, arguing that it is a mistake to view only schizophrenic patients as delusional, while excluding large groups of society from such an analysis. If we abandon the idea that whole communities cannot share a delusion, we can come to a better understanding about why the world is such a dangerous place.

Lawrie Reznek is associate professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. He has published three books on the philosophy of psychiatry, and one novel.

1 Introduction: Delusions about Delusions 2 Chapter One: The Translation Paradox 3 Chapter Two: The Incorrigibility Paradox 4 Chapter Three: Is Everyone Mad? 5 Chapter Four: The Community Paradox 6 Chapter Five: Communal Madness: Religious and Secular 7 Chapter Six: The Rationality Paradox 8 Chapter Seven: The Evolution of Error 9 Chapter Eight: Delusions are Dangerous 10 Conclusion: The Sleep of Reason