Growing up among deeply religious people in a deeply religious community was weird for me. The people around me kept saying they saw, heard or felt things that I never sensed at all. People would claim they could see "Noor" (Light) in a person's face when that person was a good Muslim. Of course problems arose when a particular person with tons of "Noor" in their face turned out to be a complete hypocrite. I recall several people saying they saw Jinns (Spirits/Demons/Ghosts) approach them and they did xyz from the Quran and beat them. My father and others would also say, quite often, that they had visions of inspiration from Allah and I never understood how that worked. I remember people claiming that they could sense the presence of a Jinn or Angels when someone spoke and it always confused me as to how I never felt heard or saw any of these things at all (Although I lied about it a bunch).
Now it's easy to say that all the things they said were lies, like mine were, but I was honestly a little sociopathic back in the day and I think that sociopathy is what it takes to keep up years of constant lies to blend into a crowd like that. To this day I think they were genuinely deluded. Some of the things said were lies, but the majority were genuine delusions. This was simply a group of ordinary religious people, albeit a little radical.
The question is, what point between having mini delusions to keep up with your friends and full blown schizophrenia/hallucinations can a person be regarded as mentally ill.
Now it's easy to say that all the things they said were lies, like mine were, but I was honestly a little sociopathic back in the day and I think that sociopathy is what it takes to keep up years of constant lies to blend into a crowd like that. To this day I think they were genuinely deluded. Some of the things said were lies, but the majority were genuine delusions. This was simply a group of ordinary religious people, albeit a little radical.
The question is, what point between having mini delusions to keep up with your friends and full blown schizophrenia/hallucinations can a person be regarded as mentally ill.