Use this glossary to understand clinical and digital-safety terms without treating any single word as a diagnosis.
Showing all 34 terms.
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A research concept describing neutral events or internal experiences suddenly feeling unusually important, threatening, or personally meaningful. It is one proposed mechanism behind delusion formation.
Important: It is an explanatory model, not a diagnosis or a way to prove why one person has a belief.
A descriptive phrase for situations in which chatbot output becomes incorporated into or appears to strengthen delusional or manic thinking.
Important: It is not a formal diagnosis, and current evidence is early.
Reduced or absent awareness that one is ill or that certain experiences are symptoms. This can make treatment discussions difficult and is not simply stubbornness.
Important: A person can lack insight into some symptoms while making capable decisions in other areas.
Information from relatives, friends, records, employers, clinicians, or other sources that helps establish baseline functioning, symptom timing, and objective events.
Important: Clinicians should follow consent, privacy, and emergency-law requirements.
A perceived voice or communication that gives an instruction. The instruction may be harmless, frightening, self-destructive, or directed toward another person.
Important: Any command involving harm, weapons, trespass, stopping essential care, or dangerous travel requires urgent assessment.
A team-based, recovery-oriented approach for early psychosis that commonly combines psychotherapy, medication management, family education, case management, peer support, and help with work or education.
Important: Program names and eligibility vary by region.
An acute, fluctuating disturbance of attention and awareness caused by a medical condition, substance, medication, withdrawal, or multiple factors.
Important: New delirium is a medical emergency and is not the same as a primary psychotic disorder.
A fixed belief held with strong conviction despite substantial conflicting evidence and not ordinarily accepted within the person’s cultural or subcultural context.
Important: Unusual content alone is not enough; evidence, context, flexibility, and associated symptoms matter.
A psychotic disorder in which one or more persistent delusions are central while functioning and thought organization may remain relatively preserved outside the belief’s impact.
Important: A professional must rule out mood, substance, medical, neurological, and schizophrenia-spectrum causes.
A disruption in the usual integration of awareness, memory, identity, emotion, perception, or bodily experience. Examples include depersonalization and derealization.
Important: Dissociation can coexist with trauma, psychosis, mood disorders, substances, or neurological conditions.
Services designed to identify and treat psychosis early, often during a first episode or early years of illness.
Important: In the United States, many programs use the term coordinated specialty care.
The first recognized period in which a person has clear psychotic symptoms. The final diagnosis may remain uncertain until follow-up shows the course.
Important: A first episode warrants assessment for medical, substance, medication, mood, trauma, and primary psychotic causes.
A trauma-related re-experiencing episode in which a past event feels as though it is happening again in the present.
Important: Sensory experiences confined to flashbacks are assessed differently from persistent hallucinations occurring outside trauma re-experiencing.
A fixed belief of exceptional power, status, knowledge, identity, ability, or special relationship. Espionage themes may involve secret clearance, recruitment, or a world-saving mission.
Important: Grandiose beliefs can occur in mania, schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, delusional disorder, and some medical or substance-related states.
Techniques that redirect attention to the present moment through breathing, sensory details, orientation, movement, or contact with a trusted person.
Important: Grounding may reduce distress but is not a substitute for urgent care when risk or medical warning signs are present.
A perception-like experience without a matching external stimulus, such as hearing a voice, seeing an image, feeling touch, or smelling an odor that others do not perceive.
Important: Hallucinations can have psychiatric, neurological, medical, substance, medication, sensory-loss, or sleep-related causes.
Persistent scanning for danger and heightened sensitivity to possible threat, often seen after trauma or during severe anxiety and paranoia.
Important: Hypervigilance can feel compelling while still differing from a fixed psychotic delusion.
A feeling or belief that a neutral event, message, gesture, broadcast, or coincidence has special personal meaning.
Important: The degree of conviction and retained doubt helps distinguish an idea of reference from a fixed delusion.
Awareness that an experience may be related to a mental or medical condition and that one’s interpretation might be mistaken.
Important: Insight exists on a spectrum and can change during recovery.
A communication approach summarized as Listen, Empathize, Agree, and Partner. It emphasizes relationship and shared goals rather than arguing over diagnosis.
Important: Empathy validates distress; it does not require agreeing that an unverified belief is true.
A severe mood episode involving abnormally elevated, expansive, or irritable mood together with increased energy or activity, often with reduced need for sleep, rapid speech, racing thoughts, grandiosity, and risky behavior.
Important: Psychosis, severe impairment, or hospitalization indicates a manic episode rather than hypomania.
Delusions or hallucinations whose themes fit the current mood—for example, special power during mania or deserved punishment during severe depression.
Important: Mood congruence is one part of assessment and does not determine a diagnosis by itself.
A strongly held, emotionally important belief that dominates thinking but retains more flexibility than a delusion and may be shared by a group.
Important: Cultural and subcultural context must be considered.
A spectrum of suspiciousness and threat beliefs ranging from understandable caution to severe, fixed persecutory delusions.
Important: The term does not specify a diagnosis or prove that a concern is false.
A fixed belief that a person or organization intends to harm, monitor, punish, sabotage, poison, exploit, or conspire against the individual.
Important: Actual stalking or abuse can occur, so assessment should not start from automatic belief or disbelief.
A collection of symptoms involving some loss of contact with shared reality, commonly including delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking, or markedly disorganized behavior.
Important: Psychosis is a syndrome or state that can occur in many psychiatric and medical conditions.
A major depressive episode accompanied by delusions or hallucinations, often involving guilt, ruin, disease, death, or deserved punishment.
Important: It carries a high suicide risk and requires prompt professional treatment.
The ability to compare one’s thoughts and perceptions with shared evidence, consider alternatives, and update a conclusion when information changes.
Important: Reality testing can be impaired temporarily or persistently and may improve with sleep, treatment, or recovery from a medical cause.
An action intended to reduce perceived threat, such as repeated checking, avoidance, recording, dismantling devices, or carrying protective equipment.
Important: Some ordinary safety steps are reasonable; escalating or repetitive behaviors can maintain fear and create new risks.
A situation in which closely connected people share or reinforce the same delusional framework, often in the context of isolation, dependence, or coercion.
Important: Each person needs an individual assessment, and coercive compliance must be distinguished from genuine belief.
A tendency for a model to mirror, flatter, or agree with a user rather than reliably challenge an unsupported premise.
Important: Agreeable generated text is not independent verification, authority, or evidence of a mission.
Experiences in which thoughts feel publicly accessible, placed into the mind, or removed by an external force.
Important: These are clinically important passivity experiences and warrant professional assessment.
Care that prioritizes safety, transparency, choice, collaboration, cultural awareness, and avoidance of unnecessary re-traumatization.
Important: It does not mean accepting every interpretation as fact; it means assessing respectfully and proportionately.
A practical strategy that addresses mental-health symptoms and proportionate real-world safety concerns in parallel.
Important: It avoids both automatic dismissal and an escalating personal investigation.
Clinicians look at onset, duration, sleep, mood, attention, cognition, substances, medication exposure, medical symptoms, trauma, cultural context, functional change, and risk. The same word can describe very different situations.
Espionage Psychosis is an educational resource, not a diagnosis, emergency service, law-enforcement service, or substitute for a licensed clinician. Actual stalking, abuse, and privacy violations can occur; serious concerns deserve calm professional assessment without automatically confirming or dismissing them.