(to protect the interests of some friends of mine, this will be a read-only posting)
I've had to let a friend go today, and the situation leading up to it has been one of great sadness for me. It's a terrible thing to have to do, but sometimes there simply is no alternative. Someone I know and respect is delusional. Not in the general, easily diagnosable "my wife has been replaced by a demon" kind of delusion, but another more insidious kind, wherein the person involved avoids reality by inventing delusions and hopping from one to the next like so many lily-pads. These people are not just pathological liars who invent random untruths aimlessly, nor are they social predators who manipulate the truth for their own gain. It's worse than that: these people simply do not access reality directly, but only through their own personal and continuous mythologizing. This is twice in my life now that I've been involved with someone who suffers from this kind of condition. One I am divorced from (luckily). Although I never anticipating meeting another one (one per lifetime is already excessive), the other has been a wonderful and interesting friend for several years.
Sadly, though, people with this sickness, being unable to accommodate reality for themselves (for whatever reasons I can't begin to guess), cause massive pain and disruption to other people's lives. You see, our lizard brains are wired to share information as much as possible -- it's one of our greatest survival mechanisms. It's no accident that professional liars learn to internalized their inventions, because once they've done so, they can use our human minds against us. Everyone knows how this works, so we do our best to recognize motivated deception. Other times, when it's just the case of someone who's a little warped (and who isn't, at least a little?), you can always say "ok, well Bill said X, but knowing Bill, it probably went down more like Y".
But when the person is neither conceiving advantageous schemes nor acting from the sort of consistent personal biases that we like to call "personality", but is simply selecting the next bearable delusion, there is no way to protect oneself. Stay in proximity long enough, and your own lizard-brain will internalize the person's new version of reality, regardless of what you know or do, even if you already recognize the delusion as false. As Homo Sapiens, we simply cannot help it.
There is no DSM-IV for these people, no intervention, no cognitive therapy, no regime of drugs. Being estranged from reality at the hardware level, with no differentiation between recognizing the truth and selecting it, there is literally nothing that can be done to help them. These people are like falling knives -- there's just nothing you can do but step backwards and help to clean up the mess that gets made on the way down.
This is twice now that I've lost someone to this, first a spouse, and now a friend. And it sucks.
