Ahmed (not his real name) is in his late twenties, and worked at a private company for the past 4 years. He believes that someone is always watching him.
His family tried to reassure him and check for evidence, but he kept saying that the people watching him were part of a “highly trained organisation”.
When asked why they are watching him specifically he would not answer. At work, he would be very vigilant going through the surveillance system at the end of every working day looking for the person he believes is following him.
A few months back he got engaged and started to believe that his fiancé was “a member of the organisation following him” so he decided to end the relationship.
This alerted the family to seek help from a psychiatrist. Talking with Ahmed was not easy as he believed strongly that he was being followed and would try to dismiss any attempt to reason with him.
In the above example, Ahmed appears to suffer from what is known as delusional disorder which is a mental health condition where a person has persistent, false beliefs (delusions) that aren't based in reality and not shared by other members of the community.
These beliefs can last for a long time yet in most cases they do not affect the person's life. This is different from schizophrenia where a person has delusions and hallucinations (hearing voices that do not exist) which leads to impairment in his daily activities.
Delusions may involve situations that can occur in real life like being followed, poisoned, infected, or loved at a distance. Or they may be very unlikely to occur, like the person who believes that he has no heart or internal organs or that he was abused by aliens.
Sometimes a delusion is not easy to detect because the person can convince those around him and ‘brainwash’ others to follow him or her, which we often see in some cults.
In 1970 a Saudi man called Juhayman al Otaybi led the Grand Mosque seizure in Mecca as he believed that the Mahdi, a messianic figure in Islamic eschatology, had arrived in the form of his brother-in-law, Muhammad bin Abdullah al Qahtani. Juhayman and his group aimed to proclaim Al Qahtani as the Mahdi and sought to overthrow the Saudi regime.
They managed to convince around 200-300 people to follow them to take control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. They pretended to join the early morning prayers then used weapons for a siege that lasted for two weeks and hundreds of people were killed. Although it is difficult to say that Juhayman had mental illness as there is no record of him being assessed by a psychiatrist, we can conclude from the belief he had and the way he acted by killing fellow Muslims in a holy place that he may have suffered from a dangerous delusion.
The same could be said about some cult leaders who claim to have religious powers and end up killing their followers. Finally, people need to be aware that delusional beliefs can drive different forms of destructive behaviours and think before following other's ideologies.
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