These criteria help clinicians avoid misclassifying normative religious experiences as delusional by focusing on specific features of the belief and its broader context.
[11] In a comparative study sampling 313 patients, those with religious delusion were found to be aged older, and had been placed on a drug regime or started a treatment programme at an earlier stage.
[11] A study found adherents to new religious movements to have similar delusionary cognition, as rated by the Delusions Inventory, to a psychotic group, although the former reported feeling less distressed by their experiences than the latter.
[20] In a 1937 essay, Sigmund Freud stated that he considered believing in a single god to be a delusion,[1] thus extending his 1907 comment that religion is the indication of obsessional neurosis.
In 2011, a team of psychiatrists, behavioral psychologists, neurologists and neuropsychiatrists from the Harvard Medical School published research that suggested the development of a new diagnostic category of psychiatric disorders related to religious delusion and hyperreligiosity.
[29] He does so in chapters containing, in sequence, an analysis of character traits of the "savior of mankind", a description of the possible course of events from the period of Jesus' public activity, a naturalistic explanation of his miracles.
[27] The researchers concluded that "If David Koresh and Marshall Applewhite are appreciated as having psychotic-spectrum beliefs, then the premise becomes untenable that the diagnosis of psychosis must rigidly rely upon an inability to maintain a social group.
A subset of individuals with psychotic symptoms appears [sic] able to form intense social bonds and communities despite having an extremely distorted view of reality.
The existence of a better socially functioning subset of individuals with psychotic-type symptoms is corroborated by research indicating that psychotic-like experiences, including both bizarre and non-bizarre delusion-like beliefs, are frequently found in the general population.
In contemporary times persons judged to have experienced auditory hallucination include those hearing voices instructing or motivating them to commit violent acts.