You needn’t be wrong to be called delusional

The relationship between madness and truth is a complex one. They are regarded as strangers but actually are more like distant cousins says Vaughan Bell writing in the guardian.

He looks back to the early 1970s and the case of Martha Beall Mitchell  the wife of a US senator who saw the cover-up of the Watergate burglaries first hand.  Her claims of corruption in the White House were dismissed as delusionary and she was made out to be a mad woman by the Nixon administration. When the Watergate scandal broke her claims were found to be true.

Bell looks at the re- definition of delusion in the new version of the psychiatrists’ diagnostic manual and discusses it in more detail in relation to mental health.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/aug/04/truly-madly-deeply-delusional