# My friend believes he is a prophet **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [July 12, 2012, 5:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972 "2012-07-12T05:16:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![6ImpossibleThingsB4Breakfast](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/6/e19adc/32.png) [@6ImpossibleThingsB4Breakfast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/6ImpossibleThingsB4Breakfast)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2012, 1:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972/21 "2012-07-12T13:53:47Z")
Maybe **kanicbird** ’s seen the stand-up routine. ---
**Author:** ![StusBlues](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/dc4da7/32.png) [@StusBlues](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/StusBlues)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2012, 1:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972/22 "2012-07-12T13:59:36Z")
> [@VinylTurnip](#): > > Well, there’s one endorsement. I see what you did there. Bozuit, do you know this guy’s family? If you’re really afraid of what your friend might do, make sure they’re aware of what’s going on. It sounds like whatever it is that’s up is below the level of “danger to oneself or others” just now, but he still [might need some help](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoF_a0-7xVQ), and the family is usually the locus of that. ---
**Author:** ![Phoebestar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/13edae/32.png) [@Phoebestar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Phoebestar)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2012, 2:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972/23 "2012-07-12T14:54:16Z")
To me (psychiatric social worker), from what you’ve described it sounds like a manic phase with psychosis, especially after hearing he was just suicidal/depressed. Keep an eye on him, and talk to his friends, family, someone else that knows him about what’s going on. I did once work with a guy that had smoked pot daily (and been very productive) for about 20 years, when he decided he was too old for that stuff, and quit. He immediately went into a manic phase. We thought that maybe he always had underlying bipolar disorder that was being managed by the marijuana. ---
**Author:** ![DocCathode](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/doccathode/32/18773_2.png) [@DocCathode](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DocCathode)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2012, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972/24 "2012-07-12T15:02:35Z")
I agree that it sounds like a manic phase of Bipolar Affective Disorder. HOWEVER---- Unless he is a threat to himself or others all that a doctor or the police can do is order him held for 72 hours. They cannot force him to take medication, or to undergo counseling. The most likely scenario is that the doctors agree that he’s manic. But, they let him go after 72 hours. He is then extremely pissed that a friend called the authorities on him and may stop talking to you all together. PS I’d like to hear from Schizophrenic On The Loose **AHunter3** on this. I believe I’ll PM him. ---
**Author:** ![DocCathode](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/doccathode/32/18773_2.png) [@DocCathode](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DocCathode)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2012, 3:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972/25 "2012-07-12T15:17:59Z")
I say just stay a friend and keep an eye on him. Maybe, (big maybe) say that you’re worried about him. Right now, there’s nothing you can really do and no reason to force treatment on him. I know a guy who thinks I’m Jesus. I am not exaggerating, not even a little. He thinks I am the One Begotten Son, The Lamb Of God. I’ve told him repeatedly that I am just a man and that my father was a man named Fred and not the Holy Spirit. I understand that this man is delusional. He is not, however, a threat to himself or others. I finally did succeed in getting him to stop calling me Jesus. He now calls me “rabbi”. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2012, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972/26 "2012-07-12T15:55:49Z")
> [@kanicbird](#): > > Is it helping or hurting him? Just because you don’t agree with his faith doesn’t mean that you are a authority on it. But you are able to observe the real world effects on his life, if it appears to be moving in a positive direction. I was thinking something along the lines of this, although more of a MYOB thing. > [@](#): > > He is obviously ‘seeking’ due to the question are you a alien, but he must learn that the answers are inside him, not external in you. This seeking is a common thing in human history, sometimes part of a vision quest, and I would consider it normal and needed. I was not thinking something along those lines. ---
**Author:** ![L.mo5rg](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f475e1/32.png) [@L.mo5rg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/L.mo5rg)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2012, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972/27 "2012-07-12T16:39:28Z")
For the people who are calling this psychotic, alot of the things he says he believes in are their in other beliefs. Sikhism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Scientology all believe in reincarnation. There’s a whole host of [UFO religions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_religion). Islam, Christianity and Judaism believe in magic, angels and djinn. And as far as most of these religions were considered, some dude randomly got enlightened or received a message from god, which previously didn’t exist. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2012, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972/28 "2012-07-12T16:40:53Z")
> [@StrangeBird](#): > > Contact your local mental health service and tell them what you just told us. What you’ve described are psychotic delusions, and he needs treatment. > > He doesn’t think he’s crazy because this form of illness often involves a lack of insight. > > If you’re not sure how to contact your local mental health service, call the local hospital - they should be able to help you with that. In 1980 I was pretty sure I had had a visionary experience, providing me with answers that would address some of the most critical social ills of our species. I began trying to communicate with people about it. I was obviously quite excited about it, very intense. People to whom I spoke tended to find the content that I was so excited about to be difficult to make any sense of. Someone did decide I probably needed treatment. Technically I consented to this but it was not explained to me that agreeing in writing to talk to the doctor was considered to be consent to being held in perpetuity at the facility, and they took away my shoestrings and belt and stuck me on the severely deranged ward for observation. Fast forward about a decade and change and I’m now in grad school and getting an academic paper published. The content of the paper is the same stuff I was trying to tell people in 1980. I still at this time think of the experience circal 1980 as a visionary experience. At no time have I considered myself to have needed or to have benefitted from psychiatric [del]interference[/del] intervention. (you can then fast forward again to today. half a lifetime later it still stands as a milestone and life-defining experience, I still ascribe to the concepts and beliefs I acquired during that event. I’m also an active member of the psychiatric patients’ liberation movement and I fervently oppose forced treatment) Now back to this person referenced in the OP. If he isn’t hurting anyone, both he and the world in general are best off if you leave him the freedom of being someone you do not currently understand. Leave your armchair psychiatry in your armchair. People who aren’t hurting anyone have the right to think thoughts YOU do not understand without being scooped up in a butterfly net and placed on some locked ward and pumped full of mind-numbing chemicals. Psychiatric pharaceuticals are non-benign. They have a very bad track record for efficacy and for the likelihood of creating dependency and bad side effects. The psychiatric system itself also breeds dependency, inculcates a sense of disability, reduces expectations internally and externally, leaves people with the threat of forcible incarceration and intervention perpetually hanging over them, and generally does not offer an offsetting advantage such as a good long-term track record for stabilizing people who would otherwise remain and/or end up on the street as derelicts or deranged people or violent people or whatever. Instead, the long term track record for _untreated_ people who were diagnosed by the system as severely mentally ill is better than the long term track record for those that they do treat. ---
**Author:** ![elbows](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/b3f665/32.png) [@elbows](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elbows)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2012, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972/29 "2012-07-12T16:42:39Z")
> [@](#): > > alot of the things he says he believes in are their in other beliefs Which has no bearing, whatsoever, on whether or not he is _ **actually** _ psychotic. Get him to someone who _ **can** _ diagnose him, as his friend, shouldn’t that be your instinct? ---
**Author:** ![Bozuit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/edb3f5/32.png) [@Bozuit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bozuit)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2012, 4:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972/30 "2012-07-12T16:43:46Z")
I’m not sure if the beliefs cause any danger. If anything it’s making him feel more positive, which is why I’m not sure how to respond to what he says. But I’m also afraid that if this is not squashed somehow it will grow into something much more dangerous. For now we’ve agreed that I will write down exactly how I disagree with what he’s saying and we’ll make it something of a debate. I’ll ask him to look at himself too. Yes I do know his family but I’m not sure if I should bring them into it yet. He says he’s shared a lot of this with his dad actually, and I’m surprised his dad hasn’t reacted in some way to make him doubt these ideas a bit. He said that actually this is not a change for him except that he is not hiding it any more. But that counts as a change. In fact he has been making less and less effort to hide weird behaviour and to fight compulsions over the last few years, which is perhaps not “bad” in itself but seems like a sign of something else which _is_ bad. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2012, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972/31 "2012-07-12T16:52:24Z")
> [@L.mo5rg](#): > > For the people who are calling this psychotic, alot of the things he says he believes in are their in other beliefs. Sikhism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Scientology all believe in reincarnation. There’s a whole host of [UFO religions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_religion). Islam, Christianity and Judaism believe in magic, angels and djinn. And as far as most of these religions were considered, some dude randomly got enlightened or received a message from god, which previously didn’t exist. What makes you mentally ill is not **what** you believe, but **how** and **why** you believe it. ---
**Author:** ![L.mo5rg](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f475e1/32.png) [@L.mo5rg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/L.mo5rg)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2012, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972/32 "2012-07-12T16:52:47Z")
> [@elbows](#): > > Which has no bearing, whatsoever, on whether or not he is _ **actually** _ psychotic. > > Get him to someone who _ **can** _ diagnose him, as his friend, shouldn’t that be your instinct? From what’s described in the OP I think the only real symptom of psychosis is him having delusions of grandeur, and as delusions go its not actually that bad (at least he doesn’t think he’s the president or something). ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2012, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972/33 "2012-07-12T16:57:31Z")
> [@elbows](#): > > Which has no bearing, whatsoever, on whether or not he is _ **actually** _ psychotic. > > Get him to someone who _ **can** _ diagnose him, as his friend, shouldn’t that be your instinct? Nope. They have a liability consideration and they (not unreasonably) have a desire to believe in the efficacy of the services they provide. Psychiatric treatment for alleged “psychotics” is non-benign. ---
**Author:** ![lavenderviolet](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/cdc98d/32.png) [@lavenderviolet](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lavenderviolet)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2012, 11:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972/34 "2012-07-12T23:56:56Z")
It doesn’t bode well that he’s sitting around smoking weed since marijuana has been implicated in making psychotic symptoms worse: [Long-term effects of cannabis - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_effects_of_cannabis#Psychosis) If I were you, I’d try to get him in for a psychiatric evaluation - voluntarily if you can, but if he refuses help then I do think it would be justified to have him go to an ER to be evaluated. They can assess if there is reason to think he’s dangerous and needs hospitalization (trust me, they don’t keep people locked up on psych wards nowadays unless there is reason to think there is pressing danger of suicide or homicide - there aren’t many psych beds available in most places and keeping people in the hospital is expensive so the bean counters will try to find any reason to kick people out as soon as possible). I would definitely tell the doctors everything you mentioned in the original post on this thread. ---
**Author:** ![Mewl\_Dear](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Mewl\_Dear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mewl_Dear)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2012, 12:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972/35 "2012-07-13T00:10:34Z")
> [@kanicbird](#): > > Is it helping or hurting him? Just because you don’t agree with his faith doesn’t mean that you are a authority on it. But you are able to observe the real world effects on his life, if it appears to be moving in a positive direction. > > He is obviously ‘seeking’ due to the question are you a alien, but he must learn that the answers are inside him, not external in you. This seeking is a common thing in human history, sometimes part of a vision quest, and I would consider it normal and needed. Oh, that was perfect. Which question did you answer? Obtuse, mewl ---
**Author:** ![kanicbird](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/5f8ce5/32.png) [@kanicbird](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kanicbird)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2012, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972/36 "2012-07-13T00:14:31Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > I was thinking something along the lines of this, although more of a MYOB thing. > > I was not thinking something along those lines. My suggestions is to be: 1 openminded but observe and evaluate not based on preconceived ideas you may hold, but on the observed outcome. If the observed outcome is not harmful accept what he is doing as valid as what you are doing And 2: if you really feel he is hurting himself, not from his beliefs as you are no authority on that, but from results of his actions, then reach out for help. But please make sure you are doing it for him (as best as you can) and not to justify your beliefs (that he is wrong). If he is serving God in such capacity, and you act totally out of compassion and not trying to impose your beliefs on how people should be, I don’t believe there will be any negative consequences for either of you although he may go through something but will be justified and released and be stronger in his path. ---
**Author:** ![Bozuit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/edb3f5/32.png) [@Bozuit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bozuit)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2012, 1:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972/37 "2012-07-13T01:14:55Z")
Sorry **Kanicbird** but I don’t believe in any kind of god, destiny, design or purpose in the universe. I try to keep an open mind but I believe in evidence and therefore while I do not outright reject the possibility that he’s right, without evidence it’s overwhelmingly more likely that he has some mental health issues and I cannot risk his health on tiny chances. Besides, as my argument to him will go, if he is truly “meant” to do what he believes he will not be stopped by mere mortals such as me or a doctor. On a separate note he’s volunteering a bit too much information about things that I’d generally expect to stay private even among the closest friends (at least for males). Could this be a symptom of anything? ---
**Author:** ![DocCathode](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/doccathode/32/18773_2.png) [@DocCathode](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DocCathode)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2012, 1:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972/38 "2012-07-13T01:22:28Z")
> [@Bozuit](#): > > On a separate note he’s volunteering a bit too much information about things that I’d generally expect to stay private even among the closest friends (at least for males). Could this be a symptom of anything? It could be a symptom of very many things. The only important question remains- is he a threat to himself or others? ---
**Author:** ![Bozuit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/edb3f5/32.png) [@Bozuit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bozuit)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2012, 1:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972/39 "2012-07-13T01:42:19Z")
He is not clearly a threat to either himself or others currently. But if he has bipolar disorder he may well be a threat to himself during the depressive phases. There is also always the chance his symptoms will get worse until he is a danger to someone. Lastly, simply believing cannabis is magic (as he does) is both a threat to his health and his hopes for the future. Before he was under no illusions that his habit was a bad thing, but now he has convinced himself that it’s positive. ---
**Author:** ![Kenm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/bc79bd/32.png) [@Kenm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kenm)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2012, 6:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972/40 "2012-07-13T06:56:27Z")
> [@Bozuit](#): > > He says he’s shared a lot of this with his dad actually, and I’m surprised his dad hasn’t reacted in some way to make him doubt these ideas a bit. His dad doesn’t live with him, so its less likely his son could “help” him experience reincarnation with a gentle push off the balcony (or any other way that might come to mind). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-friend-believes-he-is-a-prophet/627972.md?page=3)