Knitting Delusions

Delusional beliefs do not usually arrive out of nowhere. They are created like a montage is created, with scraps of items gathered together on the same page, in an idiosyncratic fashion, with some identifiable truths blended together with alarmingly strange interpretation of those true facts, and with new "facts" created out of whole cloth, and added into the mix to pull the whole concoction together into what feels like a Whole Truth, which then can be clung to against all assaults by others who seek to "clear things up" for the delusional person...

There's an interesting account written by a psychologist who also has suffered delusions, about his own psychosis. MindHacks wrote it up (here), and you can find a link to the entire paper, here.

My elderly mother is paranoid, delusional, and creates stories in that way. Along with the paranoia, she has the forgetting that comes with early Alzheimer's, hence the need to manufacture "facts" to fill in the blanks, and these new "facts" are woven together with bits of "real" reality (that which others agree upon) and her paranoid interpretations, to create her reality. What is so very sad is that in her reality nobody will help her, everyone is trying to do something bad to her... she fires all her caregivers, calls the police and accuses her neighbors of dumping trash in her yard, contemptuously accuses her only living relative, her daughter (me) of stealing from her, refuses to allow this daughter to take her out shopping, and sits alone all day and all evening. When asked, she will say she is lonely. It breaks my heart. So long as she is doing nothing overtly dangerous to herself or others, no one can compel her to accept caregivers in her home, and nobody can force her to participate in psychiatric treatment (which isn't all that likely to be effective, anyway, in this situation).