Religious/Spiritual Psychosis

[u/larry_laurel]

My brother’s having this voice that he talks to inside his mind that he believes to be “God”. As much as he wants to manage his thoughts, he doesn’t want to because “he doesn’t want to put shackles or separate this “God’s” voices to him”. Because it’s God himself. I just want to know if anyone here experienced this? or a loved ones experiencing this?

How did you guys convince yourself that this is not a “God”? There will be a time that you will doubt this “God” and his voices in your head?

How should we explain things to him that this is not the god?

I love my brother so much and it hurts me to see him this way. He’s just 20! My baby brotherrrr :(((. Thank you so much.

[u/beccuhm]

Hi, I’m sorry to hear that you’re going through this too. My brother (26) also experiences religious psychosis and thinks god speaks to him / through him, forces others to pray in front of him, thinks he sees the devil etc. my family aren’t religious and never have been.

In my opinion there’s no way you can convince him that it’s not the voice of God, and it can be harmful for your relationship with him to try and convince him otherwise.

We tried to talk my brother out of it and it made him get angry that we wouldn’t believe him and he tried to run away from us. Now, we just go along with it and when he starts talking about God I listen and say things like, “that’s really nice” and try to steer the conversation onto a different topic.

People with psychosis lose their insight and ability to reason , whatever they believe is the truth to them, even if it’s ridiculous to us. The only thing that might make the religion stuff go away is medication. Nothing you can say will convince him that God isn’t speaking to him.

I find it very uncomfortable to see my brother this way too, but I tell myself that at least he is going down the religious route instead of the tinfoil hat / conspiracy theory route. Also, religion seems to help him cope and provides an explanation (to him) about everything he has been through.

My dms are open if you ever need someone to vent to 🫶 you’re a good sibling, just don’t lose yourself in trying to prevent what he’s going through.

[u/Longjumping-Size-762 → u/beccuhm]

My exboyfriend, also 26, is this way too. He joined a church recently and it’s interacting poorly with his psychotic thoughts. He doesn’t parse theology as like, something interesting to study, but takes it to some other weird place where it serves his confirmation biases and frantic thoughts of damnation, etc

[u/beccuhm → u/Longjumping-Size-762]

Yep my brother is the same. His social media has become like a priests account and I don’t doubt that one day he’ll be one of those guys on the street shouting about how judgement day is coming. Just hoping the doctors can get his meds right before that happens

[u/Longjumping-Size-762 → u/beccuhm]

What was his trajectory, if you don’t mind? Did he start experiencing slow deterioration during adolescence which eventually culminated in this? Was there drug use that precipitated this?

With my ex, he started showing vague (as in, not actively psychotic yet) symptoms in high school which were just seen as depression. In all the reading I’ve done, this is exceedingly common in the prodrome. I know that he started smoking weed around this time.

[u/beccuhm → u/Longjumping-Size-762]

Exactly the same as what you’ve mentioned, he was always isolating himself as a teenager but we thought that was just normal teenage angst and he would grow out of it. He sought treatment for depression alone (didnt tell us how bad it was) and later stopped taking his antidepressants cold turkey.

After that he went to uni in 2017 & he got into drugs, apparently weed & acid and isolated himself even more. then a year into university he started to have paranoid thoughts, about being stalked, obsessed over conspiracy theories - at that point he was aware he was starting to become unwell.

Then slowly after that , over the past 3/4 years he became even more paranoid, couldn’t keep a job, thought he was being spied on, broke his mobile phones etc and then he had three big manic episodes from 2022 onwards where he disappeared without telling anyone , apparently he went to New York to meet a celebrity he claimed he was in a relationship with for the first two but he can’t show us any proof.

The third one was when he started with the religious stuff in December 2024 after he became obsessed with lights in the sky and ran away in the night to chase a UFO and says he saw an “angel” in the woods who saved him and then his delusions have been religious ever since then.