I have never met a person diagnosed with schizophrenia until I met my boyfriend a few months ago. I was aware he was bipolar, ADHD & OCD, until he stopped taking his medication and began to have terrible anxiety and started obsessing over the revelations in the bible. He hears “God” talking to him and he is convinced that he is a prophet and it is up to him to repopulate the earth after nuclear warfare. The thoughts are consuming him to the point where it’s all he talks about. He is very social and it’s to the point where he tells every stranger he can possibly start a conversation with, EVERYWHERE, and tell them about it, he has even had the cops threatened if he did not leave. He was emitted to a hospital 2 weeks ago and they have had him on Resperidone and depakote. His anxiety has subsided greatly but he still fully believes these thoughts and even what seems to be his own thoughts are God speaking to him. He sometimes believes that he is actually Jesus Christ. What can I do to help him? These ideas highly stress him out. And there is obviously no convincing him otherwise at this point in time. When he is released from the hospital (to my knowledge) he will only be receiving one shot of Resperidone every 2 weeks. Will this medication eventually help his hallucinations? Has anyone else known of someone having similar thoughts? How can I comfort him when he becomes stressed over these ideas?
This is a tough one. I went through this. It got pretty ugly. Somehow one day I just stopped believing in god all together. It took me until summer of 2013 to detach from the ideas. And the first major episode of becoming jesus was in October 2010.
You could try to get him to learn about critical thinking.
Honestly if I didn’t stop myself from believing in god or atleast stopped believing he could communicate with me in the form of a voice I probably would never recover from it
After getting rid of those ideas it later became about aliens. The mind loves trying all kinds of tactics
Thank you for your response! I’ve heard that those with schizophrenia can often get attached to one idea. He also went on a rant one whole night about aliens. Is there anything that can help get his mind off of such things? Maybe a hobby? Something to keep him occupied? Can certain medications help?
i dont know much about medications so someone else here can chime in on that.
but yeah get him doing some activities, look at him like a very creative individual. put his creative energy towards a musical instrument or a form of art.
God is really not good for anybody…,
**Hi @sadgirl1991~
Its very hard to convince someone when its very real to them. When his medications start kicking in ( could be a few months to really see results ). One of the best ways to help is to listen. He may have some side effects from the meds, and it may not eliminate everything-but hopefully enough to help and let him gain some insight on his illness.
Those shots are time-released which is good.
You might want to go to NAMI.org and see if there are any support groups in your area-for both of you. **
Your boyfriend sounds very similar to my son. I have a feeling he must have a lot going for him to have someone like you who obviously cares about him so much. Someone told me once that the higher the person’s intelligence the higher their delusion of grandeur. I have also been told that people with psychosis in the southern states are most likely to suffer from religiosity. Distractions are always good, but with my son the auditory hallucinations and delusions can be so overpowering that it is impossible to distract him. He has schizoaffective disorder, so he has had mood problems and has shown strong OCD tendencies. Concentration problems are a symptom of bi-polar and schizophrenia. The more scientist learn about the brain and mental illness there seems to be evidence that there is a strong biological link with all of these “disorders”. As far as meds working, that’s anybody’s guess. Only time will tell. The only thing that really helped my son with these types of beliefs was daily education regarding his illness for about three months. Once he had insight into what he was “really” experiencing he was taught some ways to cope and reality test. For a long time my son would get upset if his dad or I said anything about his illness, but when he was in a residential setting with professionals he started getting the message.
Thank you @bridgecomet. Once he is out of the hospital we will look into some support groups. I’m not sure if it’s something he will want to do but if nothing else helps him then I hope he will understand.
@mamakaye this is true. He has a very high IQ that he has been tested for multiple times. Your son sounds alot like him. Being in the hospital has atleast made him realize that he was a danger to himself and others. His parents and I couldn’t convince him that he needed help so they called the cops to have him emitted. He is slowly recovering but the delusions are still very real to him. Regardless of it all he is the most loving, thoughtful and caring guy I’ve ever met, and I never would have guessed that this would happen to him. I listen to his rants when he is having an episode but he always asks if I believe him. I don’t know how to tell him. I just simply say that God is good to have as a moral compass but you have to live your own life and not worry about things that are out of your control. He spoke nothing of all of this when we met so I’m hoping we can get back to that point eventually. Thank you so much for your insight.
You know that entire writing was a visual hallucination. How did a visual hallucination get preserved that long?
Most become obsessed with it when they find out certain things. It’s just bound to become an obsession actually, no way around it sometimes.
I thought i was jesus once, but here is how it happened. I was out smoking by meself about 3 in the mourn and i though “im jesus”, it was confusing as shit, a second or two later someone said “see, that is how we do that to people.”
It sounded and felt just like me, it wasn’t.
Get him to the hospital as soon as possible, like right now would be great. If they are screwing with him he needs some meds, unless you know someone that can actually handle problems like that. Thats all the advice that you need, get him to the hospital.
I also had biblical delusions. I was obsessed about the book of revelations. I also thought that I came from a lineage of Christ and that I was the rider on the white horse. I talked to my brother at the time about that and no one knew there was something wrong with me as I wasn’t diagnosed at the time. I told my brother about my delusions in a way that I actually needed affirmations for my delusions. I wanted him so bad to tell me that he also see the possibility that I might have been Christ’s descendent. Instead he told me that sometimes his wife also read stuff in the bible and then she tries to see it as part of her circumstance. He told me not to take it up literally. I sort of let go of the delusion somehow because he gave me a reality check. It was my delusion to be Christ and I wanted so badly for others to recognize it in me. I was uncertain about that “fact”. It took me about two years on meds to realize that I was having delusions. I never lived the delusion out fully as their was always the notion in my mind that I might be wrong and then I would have been humiliated. Emotional agony, unbearable anxiety, extreme paranoia and crippling depression has convinced my psychologist of four years to refer me to a psychiatrist. The meds will bring your bf relieve of the symptoms and gradually with time he might start to gain insight. Reality checks are so important in the recovery process and requires a strong person and most of the time trained professionals to help with that. I wish you all the best with your bf and hope that he pulls it through very soon. Injectable meds are good and not like pills which you can forget to take. I was on a depot for two years. Today I believe in a higher power of some sort but not in the bible anymore. To me Christ was just a prophet in his own time. Good luck
Now this is a prime example of a religious delusion…self proclaimed prophet with a mission like Noah (To repopulate the earth after a catastrophe that wipes out almost all life). Thinking he is Jesus is also a delusion.
Not sure if it would do any good but get familiar with the bible and try to reason with him from the scriptures, and NOT just the book of Revelation. Jesus spoke of false Christs and false prophets. They talk about how any personal revelations need to be tested and confirmed.
Not comparing him to Charles Manson, but Manson is one of the most extreme examples of someone who had bizarre interpretations of the book of revelations and a lot of people died as a result of it…
Where in Revelations does he see anything about a prophet repopulating the world? It simply isn’t there at all. the only special people it talks about are 2 witnesses that testify about God in Jerusalem and are killed… as for anything else, Christ comes back and judges the world, then after that he returns with all the believers to repopulate it…No one person or small group of people are involved with it.
Once your boyfriend stabilized on his meds this talk should all go away. I hope so too. good luck and I hope you keep us posted about how he is doing?
@e_lunaseer, the part about repopulating the earth is what “God” tells him. He thinks he is one of the witnesses and he starts to panic sometimes because he thinks Satan is going to kill him. We were sitting in a hotel one night and he suddenly insisted I opened the bible to a certain page (at random) and it happened to be the verse about the two witnesses, so ever since that he believes that him and I are the two witnesses. I was raised to believe in God but I never have considered myself a Christian. I believe in a higher power but I’ve honestly never really believed in the bible or lived the typical lifestyle of a “Christian”. It makes this situation even more difficult.
This is his 5th or 6th time being hospitalized, the last time he was in a state institution, and I have no idea what they fed him, but ever since he left there he has been having these religious delusions. He went in there as a complete atheist. He says they proved to him that he was a visionary/prophet. And they supposedly let him speak with Obama over the phone because he was having visions(not sure of what). But from what I gathered they encouraged these delusions he is having and that’s what makes me very confused. He was only in that hospital for 19 days.
I just wish I knew of someone who could really reason with him. I’ve never been very religious. I’m at a complete loss for words at this point.
“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.” Isaac Asimov.
Overt religiosity and taking literal meaning from religious texts, does not bode well for someone with a delusion disorder.
And it will continue until he decides it’s all a lie. Or if his voices cave and tell him they are not god.
Fundamentalist literal meaning christian Religion like that is pretty harmless for someone who is NOT prone to having delusions or hallucinations.
For someone who IS , it is a huge problem
If someone wants to still believe in christian god I’d recommend taking a very conservative approach like Baptist or something
More than likely the 2 witnesses are Enoch and Elijah, the only 2 people the Bible says did not die but were taken up by God without seeing death. Since it appointed unto man once to die and they didn’t die, that’s why many Christians including myself believe those will be the 2 witnesses.
He is also probably not testing the spirits like it says in 1 John 4. You shouldn’t just listen to a voice or message that says it is God without testing its validity. Someone could program a computer to project a voice or visual image that says it is God, but it wouldn’t be God.
When I was hospitalized, there were actually TWO women on the floor who felt they were the second coming of Christ. So I don’t believe this is that unusual to schizophrenic patterns of thought.
A male patient I had befriended asked me, “Pat. If one of those two women really ARE the second coming of Christ, which one would you go to for council?” I thought about it for a bit, and then in typical guy fashion I said…
“The one with the biggest boobs!”
lol!
Thank you for the clarity and sharing your knowledge. All of this is way over my head. I will try to discuss this with him in the near future and I’ll let you know how it goes.
Good morning. I’m relieved to see some people who are having similar delusions. My wife had a bout with delusions a couple of years ago, and I was lucky to catch it early enough that I was able to get her into the hospital (she thought demons were going to kill her). She had all the classic symptoms of psychosis. At the time, her belief was that she was the Bride of Christ and was swapped out at birth.
She went on medication but sought to go off the medication because of the side effects, and the psychaitrist gradually let her reduce her medication. She went off the medication and for a couple of months, there were no voices.
Now, she is pretty bad. She has taken verses in the bible to make it seem possible that Jesus could reincarnate people (John the Baptist was Elijah) and that Mary Magdelene was the Bride of Christ and therefore, my wife could be the reincarnated Bride of Christ. She also believes that she is carrying twins (at age 51, never had babies before, pregnancy tests are negative but she calls them “inconclusive”) and that “if the twins are brown and white, they’re not yours”. Add to that her connection to “pi” and significance around times of days, days, etc that coincide with “pi”, and her trying to make names that she hears or has been called to her overall belief. She giggles all of the time to herself and writes constantly in her journal. She hears voices all of the time (mostly one).
Her sleep is off. But she is not a harm to herself or others, the criteria necessary to get her hospitalized again. I’ve asked her to go back on her medication but she believes that there is nothing wrong.
At this point in time, I consider myself lucky that’s she relatively functional in that she does chores, (she has no job), cooks, etc. But I am having a difficult time watching my wife go from a very smart, reasonable individual to this and I have picking straws to try to find an angle to dispel her delusion so that she will be convinced to go back on medication. But that’s been very difficult. I feel like the best way to do this is to buy into the delusion somewhat and reason with her on her terms and use prayers to get rid of the voices, but I have found that this doesn’t help.
I know a fair bit of the bible but because of the “anything is possible under God” exception, she justifies herself.
Anyway, any suggestions on how to convince her that the delusions are not real and for her go to back on meds (with this kind of delusion) or I am waiting for her to be forced to go into the hospital.
Thanks.