Joel Gold and Ian Gold | Suspicious Minds

“The rigidity of delusional form contrasts dramatically with the elastic nature of content. Delusional contents do more than vary with an individual sufferer’s thoughts: they adapt to culture and morph with history. Indeed, for an illness that is often characterized as a break with reality, psychosis keeps remarkably up to date with the world outside. An American with psychosis can believe that the CIA is planning to kidnap him, but in Russia, a different institution occupies the CIA’s social role, and persecutory delusions will reflect that fact. In China, someone might have the delusion that he is the chief disciple of the Buddha; a patient with a similar ‘grandiose’ delusion in Texas is not likely to believe anything like that because being the chief disciple of the Buddha doesn’t mean the same thing in Dallas as it does in Beijing. The cultural environment is, in technical terminology, ‘pathoplastic’: it shapes the content of the delusion. The same is true of delusional change over time. In keeping with the evolution of contemporary culture, people now believe that microchips or the internet do the malicious work of Matthews’s Air Loom.” Joel Gold and Ian Gold