When Love Goes Wrong 2: Psychotic or Delusional Disorders

(The full text of this video is available on the Masked AMHP Blog.)
Psychotic or delusional disorders can manifest in two basic ways:
Morbid jealousy (also known as Othello Syndrome) is when a person holds a strong delusional belief that their spouse or sexual partner is being unfaithful in the absence of any actual evidence.
Jealousy is a very common emotion, but when jealousy is entirely baseless then it can become pathological in nature. This can range along a spectrum between essentially normal feelings of jealousy, perhaps arising from an individual’s basic sense of insecurity or personal inadequacy, through to full blown psychotic illness.
Morbid jealousy is likely to take the form of constantly checking what the person’s partner is doing at any time of the day. The person may look on their partner’s mobile phone to see who they’ve been ringing or texting. They may interrogate them during the evening about what they’ve been doing, who they’ve been talking to.
This can be obsessional, but essentially non-psychotic in nature and therefore amenable to treatment, in which case, a talking therapy such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, can be effective in tackling and addressing the individual’s personal insecurities and anxieties. However, if it is truly delusional in nature, then it can be much more difficult to treat. It can also extend into stalking behaviour.
De Clerambault’s Syndrome (also known as erotomania) is a delusional belief that the person is in love with another, and that that love is reciprocated. This seems to occur most commonly in women. Usually, the subject of the person’s attention is only a casual acquaintance, and the affection is entirely unreciprocated. This belief can also lead to stalking behaviour.