Mental illness and lying and truth

If I tell you that I am Christopher Columbus, you might laugh and think I was kidding.  You are pretty sure that Chis lived in 1492 and therefore could not be alive now.  That is too long for any human to live.  But if I got angry at your laughter and haughtily informed you that your laughter was inappropriate and impolite and that believe it or not, I really am Mr. C.C., you might be appalled.  You know damned well I am not the man who set off from Spain in the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, no matter what I say.  You might calmly begin talking about something else such as an item in today's news.  If I follow your lead and go with talking about the new subject, you might be even more confused.  A stunning miracle such as actually being Columbus or being fully reincarnated as him is way too big an event to sloughed off in favor of speculations about tomorrow's weather. 

This kind of talking merry-go-round is the sort of thing we experienced with our now deceased, adult daughter during her long mental illness.  We did find it quite difficult for several years to know how to act with she asserted something impossible and stuck to her story.  She did become upset when we doubted or questioned some of her statements.  If we tried to explore the factual basis for a hard-to-believe assertion, asking when something happened or why she hadn't mentioned such stunning news before, she was often disdainful of such pedestrian questions.  Sometimes, she would inform us that the event or the fact was true 'psychically', implying that pitifully under-equipped creatures such as us could not hope to grasp the why and wherefores of higher things such as she dealt with all the time.  She did seem happy to have us calmly congratulate her on her up-coming appointment as the head of the CIA and then to go on to discuss the weather. 

We continue to be interested in mental illness.  It is surprising to me that something like asserting that one is the living Christopher Columbus doesn't sound all that troublesome.  The explorer is not a subject of daily comment so what does such an assertion really matter?  It matters because first of all, nobody likes a liar.  Making emphatic statements that are not true, sometimes statements that COULD Not be true, ruins communication.  If someone makes no distinction between what is true and what is not, we would doubt anything they say.  We would not have a good basis for friendly social interaction. 

But things could go farther in a bad direction.  Suppose such a person 'realizes' that I am Hitler or some other tyrant or criminal.  Maybe they will realize it is their duty to eliminate me.  Our daughter did decide that her boyfriend had been replaced by an identical look-alike.  She attacked him for her own safety.  She did decide that the telephone wires running along the outside of her apartment building actually led to a bomb and that it was her duty to break them, which she proceeded to do.

Not all mental illness relates to truth and non-truth.  It may involve serious, incapacitating depression or undeniable impulses to wash one's hands repeatedly or return home 5 or 10 times to check that the stove is off and the door locked.  But it is all frightening and upsetting for all concerned.