Many psychiatrists conceptualize mental illnesses, including psychotic disorders, across a continuum where their borders can be ambiguous.1 The same can be said of individual symptoms such as delusions, where the line separating clear-cut pathology from nonpathological or subclinical “delusion-like beliefs” is often blurred.2,3 However, the categorical distinction between mental illness and normality is fundamental to diagnostic reliability and crucial to clinical decisions about whether and how to intervene.
Conspiracy theory beliefs are delusion-like beliefs that are commonly encountered within today’s political landscape. Surveys have consistently revealed that approximately one-half of the population believes in at least 1 conspiracy theory, highlighting the normality of such beliefs despite their potential outlandishness.4 Here are 3 questions you can ask to help differentiate conspiracy theory beliefs from delusions.
1. What is the evidence for the belief?
Drawing from Karl Jaspers’ conceptualization of delusions as “impossible” and “unshareable,” the DSM-5 distinguishes delusions from culturally-sanctioned shared beliefs such as religious creeds.3 Whereas delusions often arise out of anomalous subjective experiences, individuals who come to believe in conspiracytheories have typically sought explanations and found them from secondary sources, often on the internet.5 Despite the familiar term “conspiracy theorist,” most who believe in conspiracy theories aren’t so much theorizing as they are adopting counter-narratives based on assimilated information. Unlike delusions, conspiracy theory beliefs are learned, with the “evidence” to support them easily located online.
2. Is the belief self-referential?
The stereotypical unshareability of delusions often hinges upon their self-referential content. For example, while it is easy to find others who believe in the Second Coming, it would be much harder to convince others that you are the Second Coming. Unlike delusions, conspiracy theories are beliefs about the world and explanations of real-life events; their content is rarely, if ever, directly related to the believer.
Conspiracy theory beliefs involve a negation of authoritative accounts that is rooted in “epistemic mistrust” of authoritative sources of information.5 While conspiratorial mistrust has been compared with paranoia, with paranoia found to be associated with belief in conspiracy theories,6 epistemic mistrust encompasses a range of justified cultural mistrust, unwarranted mistrust based on racial prejudice, and subclinical paranoia typical of schizotypy. The more self-referential the underlying paranoia, the more likely an associated belief is to cross the boundary from conspiracy theory to delusion.7
3. Is there overlap?
Conspiracy theory beliefs and delusions are not mutually exclusive. “Gang stalking” offers a vexing example of paranoia that is part shared conspiracy theory, part idiosyncratic delusion.8 Reliably disentangling these components requires identifying the conspiracy theory component as a widely-shared belief about government surveillance, while carefully analyzing the self-referential component to determine credibility and potential delusionality.