Schizophrenia's delusions

Amazingly, I've never really delved that deeply into the available literature on schizophrenia, although my previous research convinced me beyond doubt. After browsing around a little bit, I bought the book "Surviving Schizophrenia: A Family Manual" for my Kindle. Browsing through it, the following passage leapt out at me.

One simple form of a delusion is the conviction that random events going on around the person all relate in a direct way to him or her. If you are walking down the street and a man on the opposite sidewalk coughs, you don't think anything of it and may not even consciously hear the cough. The person with schizophrenia, however, not only hears the cough but may immediately decide it must be a signal of some kind, perhaps directed to someone else down the street to warn him that the person is coming. The schizophrenia sufferer knows this is true with a certainty that few people experience. If you are walking with such a person and try to reason him/her past these delusions, your efforts will probably be futile. Even if you cross the street, and in the presence of the same person, question the man about his cough, the individual will probably just decide that you are part of the plot. Reasoning with people about their delusions is like trying to bail out the ocean with a bucket. If, shortly after the cough incident, a helicopter flies overhead, the delusion may enlarge. Obviously the helicopter is watching the person, which further confirms suspicions about the cough. And if in addition to these happenings, the person arrives at the bus stop just too late to catch the bus, the delusional system is confirmed yet again; obviously the person who coughed or the helicopter pilot called the bus driver and told him to leave. It all fits together into a logical coherent whole.

Normal persons would experience these events and simply curse their bad luck at missing the bus. The person with schizophrenia, however, is experiencing different things so the events take on different meaning. The cough and the helicopter noise may be very loud to him/her and even the sound of the bus may be perceived as strange. While the normal person responds correctly to these as separate and unrelated events, similar to the stimuli and events of everyday life, the person with schizophrenia puts them together into a pattern. Thus, both overacuteness of the senses and impaired ability to logically interpret incoming stimuli and thoughts may lie behind many of the delusions experienced by afflicted minds. To them the person who cannot put these special events together must be crazy, not the other way around.

Excerpted from "Surviving Schizophrenia, A Family Manual"
E. Fuller Torrey

The idea that a schizophrenic connects all sorts of dots inappropriately, seeing patterns in random noise, definitely strikes a chord. This is certainly something my dad would do, building an ever-more elaborate delusion as various unrelated stimuli were incorporated into the whole. The example of the cough reminded me of the time my dad told me that when people put their hands up in front of their face, like to scratch their nose or something, when you look at them, that's a result of their spook training to reflexively hide their face when they're on covert ops.

The passage doesn't really explain, however, why the misinterpreted stimuli tend to have a sinister or paranoid character, and why the afflicted individual tends to believe that they are at the center of the pattern. It seems to me that someone who was misinterpreting stimuli more-or-less randomly would not be that hard to get along with. The problem here with my dad and with the schizophrenic in general seems to be that the ego (or sense of self) has expanded to include the whole environment, meaning that dealing with them is very trying. My dad constantly felt that world events were being orchestrated around him. I recall one time there was an FCC hearing on curse words in broadcasting, and he felt this was an attempt to get his broadcast off the air. (After all he would sometimes curse going about his day-to-day life, which, remember, he thought was televised to the world.) He would think that speeches by world leaders were responding to things that he had said. But perhaps together with the expansive ego, there is an expanded threat to ego, which is why threats are seen everywhere. All the negatives that are experienced are projected outwards as the work of a malevolent power. Interestingly, when we were younger my dad also talked about a vast army of good guys who were helping us out and thwarting the bad guys. The bad guys wore red shirts and the good guys wore blue shirts.  However, in recent years the good guys have not been mentioned, only the bad guys, for whatever reason. But maybe this also represents a massive externalization of internal psychological forces.

So my dad's mental processing of the world is highly distorted and it's a wonder we can communicate at all, especially since we could always have relatively high-level and meaningful conversations for minutes on end before some delusional aspect would creep in. The problem is that my conditioned expectation  of him is that he is acting as a normal human being, so that when aberrant behavior manifests, it tugs strongly at my emotions. But of course, evolution programmed me to imprint on and trust my parents, so gaining the necessary distance to interact with him without engaging is difficult. Although his mental model of others is flawed, he can be highly manipulative emotionally (probably subconsciously) which adds another layer of complication.

Anyway, I am looking forward to reading more. It's helpful to have a framework.