<b>DELUSIONAL - Psychiatric Definition:<br /><br />A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everybody else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g. it is not an article of religious faith). </b><br /><br /><b>Secondary Delusions:<br /><br />1. delusional intuition - where delusions arrive 'out of the blue', without external cause. <br /><br />2. delusional perception - where a normal percept is interpreted with delusional meaning. For example, a person sees a red car and knows that this means their food is being poisoned by the police. <br /><br />3. delusional atmosphere - where the world seems subtly altered, uncanny, portentous or sinister. This resolves into a delusion, usually in a revelatory fashion, which seems to explain the unusual feeling of anticipation.</b><br /><br /><b>TRUE BELIEVER SYNDROME:<br /><br />The true-believer syndrome is a term coined by the reformed psychic fraud M. Lamar Keene to refer to an irrational belief in the paranormal. <br /><br />Skeptics see this as a form of self-deception caused by wishful thinking in which a believer continues to accept paranormal explanations for phenomena or events, or denies the relevance of scientific findings, even after the believer has been confronted with abundant evidence that the phenomena or events have natural causes. The term is mainly used by skeptics in the debate over the existence of certain sorts of paranormal phenomena and the persistence of belief in these phenomena.</b><br /><br /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><em>Differential Diagnosis: </em>"<strong><em>I am both amused and annoyed that you think I should be less stubborn than you are</em></strong>."<br /> </p> </div>