Thinking back about yesterday’s unfortunate exchange I can see now that I might have overreacted to your initial comments and things, as you know, went very quickly down hill from there. It was very frustrating not being able to discuss my unusual belief - which I’d wanted to share for a while now.
It’s also clear that different people have different triggers, and for me, one of them is the wilful disregard during a debate (or the mere appearance of it, as it was the case) of widely agreed terms. The reason for this is rooted in personal trauma. So I was triggered (absurd, I know) by the way you used the word delusion. It’s true that sometimes the word delusion is used informally to denote false beliefs. Richard Dawkins is a very famous example of this, and also a good example of the dangers of this definitional fuzziness.
The problem I had is that you spoke of delusion in this informal sense in the same breadth that you spoke of delusion in its narrower medical sense. It’s true that a sz diagnosis requires more symptoms than just delusions, but delusions alone are enough to meet the criteria of psychosis. You even get diagnoses like delusional disorder where delusion is the only symptom.
But whatever our differences I overreacted over mere semantic differences and took things farther than I should have. I hope you can accept my apologies.
And I’m sorry, too. I didn’t mean to trigger you. You’re right, I did describe the medical type of delusional thinking & the more casual nonmedical “delusional thinking” within close range of each other, which probably made it very confusing.
