But you don't have to have neural damage to read and believe something you've read on the internet.
Never said that it meant that.
What I said is that the only "why else" when diagnosing schizophrenia as per the DSM-5 is establishing whether it's the likes of drug use or neural damage causing the problem. NOT whether they read it anywhere else. E.g., if it turns out that the guy was tripping acid when they had the hallucination, hmm, you can go Occam conform and assume it doesn't need schizophrenia too as an explanation.
Conspiracy theory websites present their arguments in a way that is intended to convince, and "communities" of conspiracy-theory believers are insular, and teach and reinforce a method of analyzing evidence that supports the conspiracy theory and warns adherents that contrary-seeming evidence has been manufactured to "fool" them.
And again, that is not an exception from the DSM-5. To repeat myself, NOTHING in there says that it's only a delusion if you came up with it yourself. The wording in DSM-3 and DSM-4 was kinda allowing for that interpretation, but that's no longer the case in the DSM-5.
That said, if you really want to go into that tangent, I'll point out that he had to do SOME of the crazy logic himself. A CT site can tell you all about the reptilian elite rulers, but it's unlikely that it will tell you that Jane Doe, a random suburban mother, is one of them. The part where his wife is one of the shapeshifting reptile and passed that DNA to her children had to be his own inference. The part where he knew his children will be such a major problem to the world as to need him to kill them to save the world, also had to be his own inference. You won't find on these kinds of CT boards some prophecy that some random 10 months old infant is the one destined to destroy the world. He had to make that connection himself. SOMEHOW.
Not the least because he had to decide who to trust on how to spot one, decide that there can be such a thing as a half-reptile child, or that a baby he's been seeing since she was days old can shape-shift to keep her real self hidden from him. The core CT is a lot more... half-assed... err... I mean compact than that, and tends to only deal with elites and full blooded reptiles. There's a lot of research and inference of his own that he need to do to decide that his wife, toddler and infant were such. Even more so to conclude that they'll be so bad in the future that he needed to save the world from them.
And there's a high probability that some other form of delusion (e.g., of reference) would be involved in making that connection from a CT that's at the level of the Queen, GW Bush or Soros being shapeshifting lizard people, to all signs pointing at a random nobody that he's married to.
If he kept his beliefs completely secret from absolutely everyone and nobody even suspected them, then we have no idea to what degree he was exposed to "contradictory evidence" that actually challenged his beliefs - perhaps not at all.
The DSM-V you linked also makes it clear that having a delusion isn't by itself enough for a schizophrenia diagnosis.
Well, this is good. Now we're getting somewhere. At least you've read the damned thing this time. Two thumbs up.
But, yes, that's why I already said I can't diagnose it over the internet from just a news article, and it just seems
plausible.
Note however, if you still want to discuss details:
1. The requirement isn't for him to have had evidence BEFORE he did the thing. You can establish that it's at the level of a delusion even afterwards. (But, just to be clear, we'll have to wait for a psychiatrist to talk to him and establish that.)
2. While you do need 2 out of 5 for full tilt schizophrenia, only the first one is needed for delusional disorder, which, really, is not all that much better. It's what was previously called paranoid disorder, and is a very serious mental illness. In fact, if it reaches the necessary level of being a problem to be diagnosed with a mental illness, it will tend to be actually more serious delusions than in actual schizophrenia. We're talking about the level where one can't distinguish reality from their own fantasy.
It's still not making the case that it's just any Random Joe reading some BS on the internet. Is all I'm saying.
3. Delusional disorder is actually a lot more rare than schizophrenia. We're talking an incidence rate between 0.007% and 0.03% for delusional disorder, vs about 1% for schizophrenia. So, you know, by probabilities alone it wouldn't be my first guess.
Mind you, it COULD be delusional disorder. It probably isn't, but it could.
