How Bizarre

Kendra Campbell, MD, Psychiatry/Mental Health, 08:05PM Dec 22, 2010

One of the more intriguing concepts in psychiatry is that of “bizarre delusions.” Delusions are fixed, false belief, and psychiatrists are taught to categorize these delusions as being either bizarre, or non-bizarre, as this can help with diagnosis.

Bizarre delusion is one that is simply 100% impossible. An example of a non-bizarre delusion would be that one is pregnant with President Obama’s child. This is certainly not likely, but it’s not 100% impossible, either. A bizarre delusion would be that one is an alien from another planet and can shoot laser beams out of one’s eyes. Perhaps this is still only 99% impossible. And therein lies the problem with defining a bizarre delusion.


An article published in the Schizophrenia Bulletin sought to provide a much more succinct definition of a bizarre delusion, and offered these criteria:

1. apparent physical or logical impossibility (implying extreme implausibility)
2. presence of a belief that is not consensually shared in a given social or cultural context
3. absence of historical or (what Jaspers called) genetic understanding: this refers to an inability to understand how a given state of mind could emerge from relevant biographical antecedents
4. incomprehensibility, in the sense of a lack of (what Jaspers called) "static understanding": this refers to the capacity to empathize with, to imaginatively identify with, a given state of mind
5. notion of "not being derived from ordinary life situations."

I thought I would share some of the delusions, which I’ve encountered as a resident in psychiatry, and let you readers decide “how bizarre” they may be.

A patient who believed that:

1. She was pregnant with Mike Tyson’s child.
2. He was being stalked by Condoleezza Rice in a government conspiracy.
3. An implant in her kidney allowed her to videotape all conversations which ever happened, in the past, present and future.
4. He could close his eyes and then magically transport himself to any place in the universe.
5. She could kill people with her invisible spirit.
6. That he was Jesus Christ and Allah.
7. Her foot had been amputated and replaced with a foot from the Virgin Mary (appropriate, I thought, for this time of the year).