Why Some People With Schizophrenia Believe They Are Jesus — or That the CIA Is Watching Them

How the brain manufactures meaning, threat, and identity when reality comes apart, and why the delusions are never random.

Popular culture files schizophrenia under random madness: scrambled thoughts, wild hallucinations, beliefs cut loose from reason. The clinical picture is stranger and more orderly than that. The illness’s most recognizable delusions, that you are Jesus Christ, that the CIA has you under watch, that your phone has been hacked to read your mind, are not noise. They follow a logic anyone can trace.

These beliefs are not accidents, and they are not simple failures of reason. They are the brain trying to explain overwhelming internal experiences with the most powerful symbols a culture hands it. Get past the stereotype and into the neuroscience, and what you find is not nonsense. It is meaning-making running without a governor.

That distinction matters far beyond the clinic. Schizophrenia affects roughly one in a hundred people over a lifetime, which in New Hampshire works out to more than ten thousand Granite Staters. How the public understands their beliefs shapes whether they are met with treatment or with fear, and whether a state with a documented mental-health bottleneck treats them as sick or as broken.

The dopamine problem: when “this matters” breaks

Schizophrenia is tied to dysregulated dopamine, especially along the brain’s mesolimbic pathway. Dopamine gets mislabeled as a pleasure chemical. Its deeper job is to flag salience — to decide what matters.

Every second, the brain filters an enormous load of sensory and internal information. Dopamine tags some of it as important, relevant, worth attention. Working properly, that system lets you lock onto a real threat, a meaningful conversation, a goal worth chasing. In schizophrenia it misfires. Neutral things — a passing car, a stray thought, a coincidence — get stamped as deeply significant. Psychiatrist Shitij Kapur named this aberrant salience in a 2003 paper that became the standard way researchers talk about how delusions form. The person feels, with force, that something is happening, even when nothing unusual is.

That feeling is a crisis. When the brain screams this matters, the mind demands to know why.

Delusions are explanations, not origins

Here is the point most public discussion misses. Delusions are not where schizophrenia starts. They are the response.

First comes the feeling — heightened importance, threat, a sense of cosmic weight. Then comes the story that contains it. If your own thoughts feel unusually powerful or revelatory, the mind reaches for a narrative big enough to hold that intensity. If the room feels hostile and surveilled, the mind looks for an agent capable of producing the dread. The explanation does not create the experience. The experience demands the explanation.

Which is why arguing straight at a delusion tends to fail. You are attacking the story while leaving untouched the sensation that produced it.

Why Jesus? Why the CIA?

The content of a delusion is cultural. The brain supplies the feeling; the society supplies the script. That split is not a metaphor. It is the central finding of a modern research literature, and it holds up in data.

Believing you are Jesus, a prophet, or a chosen divine figure is one of the best-documented delusions in schizophrenia. Not because religion causes the illness, but because religious figures are ready-made symbols of ultimate moral authority, world-historical significance, and a private line to the truth. When the inside of your head feels revelatory and universe-shaping, Jesus is an efficient container for it. The belief answers a terrifying question, why does everything feel so important, with an answer that fits the size of the feeling: because I am central to the story.

A 2011 review in Schizophrenia Research by Robin Gearing and colleagues at Columbia found that religious themes are common in delusions and that their specific content tracks the dominant religious framework around the patient. A medieval European was more likely to hear angels and demons. A modern American is more likely to believe he is Jesus — or that he is a target of the intelligence services.

Persecution tracks the politics of its era

Paranoia runs on the same engine. If your thoughts feel intrusive, controlled, imposed from outside, the mind hunts for a powerful external source. In contemporary America, few symbols capture invisible power and total observation better than a secret intelligence agency. Believing the CIA is watching you is stabilizing in the short term, because it answers what chaos cannot: why your thoughts feel monitored, why random events feel coordinated, why you feel perpetually under threat. A hostile watcher still beats a meaningless universe.

The historical record backs this up in a way the old textbooks only gestured at. A review of a century of case files at an American psychiatric hospital, published by Bradley Cannon and Lindsey Kramer in 2011, found delusions about syphilis spiking in the early 1900s, about Germans during the Second World War, and about spies and Communists during the Cold War. A separate study of South Korean patients found persecutory delusions shifting away from political persecutors as the country democratized through the 1990s and 2000s. The mind borrows its enemies from the headlines.

It is still borrowing. In 2025, researchers at UCLA published the first large look at what they call technology delusions, reviewing the records of 228 adults with psychosis treated between 2016 and 2024. Nearly nine in ten reported delusional content. Persecutory delusions were the most common form. And of the patients with delusions, more than half wove in the internet or new technology — a phone or WiFi network they believed had been hacked, a hidden camera or implanted microchip, social media posts they read as coded messages aimed at them, or the conviction, borrowed from a 1998 film, that their whole life was a broadcast staged for an audience. The study found the odds of a technology delusion rising roughly fifteen percent with each passing year. The KGB became the algorithm. The bug in the wall became the app on the phone.

When the self loses its borders

Another core feature of schizophrenia is a disturbance in the experience of the self. Most people carry a stable boundary between an inner thought and the outer world. In schizophrenia that boundary thins. Thoughts can feel alien, inserted, broadcast, controlled. The phenomenologists Louis Sass and Josef Parnas, in an influential 2003 paper in Schizophrenia Bulletin, called this a disturbance of ipseity, the basic sense of being a self at all.

If a thought does not feel like it came from you, then it must have come from somewhere. God. The CIA. Aliens. The phone. That is not broken reasoning. It is sound inference from a distorted premise. The logic is intact; the input it is working from has been corrupted.

The brain’s refusal of meaninglessness

Human beings are meaning-making machines. We would rather believe in an all-seeing enemy than accept randomness. We would rather be chosen than accept that our own experiences point to nothing. Schizophrenia exposes that tendency in its rawest form, and the same reflex operates, in gentler dress, in everyone. It is the reason ordinary people build coherent false stories and hold onto them against correction — a pattern Granite State Report has examined in the general population.

The neuroscientist Karl Friston has argued, in his free-energy account of the brain, that the brain is a prediction machine forever working to minimize uncertainty and error. Schizophrenia looks like a catastrophic failure of that system: when perception, emotion, and cognition stop lining up, the mind fills the gap with story. A delusion is not too much imagination. It is the brain’s desperation for coherence, buying order at the price of truth. Meaning beats chaos, even when the meaning is false.

Why these beliefs are so hard to dislodge

Delusions are emotionally load-bearing. When a belief explains an overwhelming internal sensation, giving it up reopens the void underneath. Telling someone the CIA is not watching does nothing about why they feel watched. Telling someone they are not Jesus does nothing to explain why they feel singular and significant.

That is why the treatment that works does not lead with confrontation. It aims to quiet the aberrant salience, often with antipsychotic medication that acts on the dopamine signaling underneath, and then to rebuild the interpretive frame slowly, alongside the person rather than against them. When the signal goes quiet, the story loosens on its own.

Not nonsense — a broken compass

It is tempting to treat these beliefs as absurd. The temptation is lazy and cruel. Schizophrenia does not invent random beliefs. It disrupts the brain systems that assign importance, draw the boundary of the self, and manufacture meaning. What comes out are exaggerated, culturally furnished attempts to answer impossible questions under extreme cognitive strain.

In that sense the illness reveals something true about all of us. We are not purely rational creatures. We are narrative creatures. When the compass breaks, we do not stop looking for direction. We just steer toward whatever landmark the culture has left standing, however wrong.

What this means for the public, and for policy

Misunderstanding schizophrenia feeds stigma and neglect. When delusions get written off as gibberish, the people having them get treated as broken instead of overwhelmed — and a state already short on psychiatric beds and clinicians finds it that much easier to look away. New Hampshire has spent years failing to move patients through emergency rooms and into care; how the public frames their beliefs is part of what determines whether that failure feels urgent or acceptable. The same neglect turns up in the state’s wider civic life, where mental-health care is one of the pressing issues both parties tend to talk past.

A model grounded in neuroscience asks for something harder than pity. It asks for empathy without romance, clarity without mysticism, and treatment without moral judgment. Understanding why someone believes these things is not the same as endorsing the belief. It is recognizing that the mind, even in crisis, is trying to survive.

Meaning generation gone rogue

Schizophrenia is not the absence of meaning. It is meaning without regulation. Jesus and the CIA and the hacked phone are not symptoms drawn at random. They are the largest symbols a culture keeps on hand to explain overpowering experiences of importance, threat, and a self coming apart. The brain supplies the feeling. The culture supplies the story.

The tragedy is not that the beliefs are strange. It is that the brain is working overtime to explain a world that has stopped playing by its rules. That is not madness as chaos. It is coherence pushed past its breaking point.

If you or someone you know is struggling with symptoms of psychosis or thoughts of self-harm, help is available. Call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any time. In New Hampshire, the Rapid Response Access Point (1-833-710-6477) offers 24/7 mental-health crisis support.

Fact check

Claim	Status	Source
Dopamine’s core function is to signal salience — what matters; dysregulated, hyperdopaminergic signaling produces “aberrant salience,” in which neutral events feel intensely significant.	VERIFIED	Kapur S. “Psychosis as a state of aberrant salience.” American Journal of Psychiatry 160(1):13–23 (2003). DOI 10.1176/appi.ajp.160.1.13; PMID 12505794. Read directly.
Religious themes are common in the content of delusions, and their specific content mirrors the dominant religious framework around the patient.	VERIFIED	Gearing R.E., Alonzo D., Smolak A., McHugh K., Harmon S., Baldwin S. “Association of religion with delusions and hallucinations in the context of schizophrenia.” Schizophrenia Research 126(1–3):150–163 (2011). DOI 10.1016/j.schres.2010.11.005; PMID 21131180.
Delusional form is largely stable across time and place, but delusional content is shaped by sociopolitical factors; a century of US hospital records showed delusions about syphilis (early 1900s), Germans (WWII), and spies/Communists (Cold War).	VERIFIED	Cannon B.J., Kramer L.M. “Delusion content across the 20th century in an American psychiatric hospital.” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 58(3):323–327 (2011). DOI 10.1177/0020764010396413. Cited in Burns et al. (2025).
A South Korean study found persecutory delusions shifting away from political persecutors as the country democratized between the 1990s and 2000s.	VERIFIED	Oh H.Y., Kim D., Park Y. “Nature of persecutors and their behaviors in the delusions of schizophrenia.” Psychiatry Investigation 9(4):319–324 (2012). DOI 10.4306/pi.2012.9.4.319. Cited in Burns et al. (2025).
In a modern cohort of 228 adults with psychosis (2016–2024), 88.2% reported delusional content; persecutory delusions were most common; of those with delusions, 51.7% incorporated technology; odds of technology delusions rose ~15% per year.	VERIFIED	Burns A.V., Nelson K., Wang H., Hegarty E.M., Cohn A.B. “‘The algorithm is hacked’: analysis of technology delusions in a modern-day cohort.” British Journal of Psychiatry (2025), open access. DOI 10.1192/bjp.2025.10452. Read directly.
The “Truman Show delusion” — the belief that one’s life is filmed and broadcast — was named by psychiatrists Joel and Ian Gold, who argue delusion content emerges from the interaction of brain and social world.	VERIFIED	Gold J., Gold I. “The ‘Truman Show’ delusion.” Cognitive Neuropsychiatry 17(6):455–472 (2012); PMID 22640240. Gold & Gold, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness (Free Press, 2014).
Schizophrenia involves a disturbance of the basic sense of self (“ipseity disturbance”), in which thoughts may feel alien, inserted, or externally controlled.	VERIFIED	Sass L.A., Parnas J. “Schizophrenia, consciousness, and the self.” Schizophrenia Bulletin 29(3):427–444 (2003). DOI 10.1093/oxfordjournals.schbul.a007017; PMID 14609238.
The brain minimizes uncertainty and prediction error (the “free-energy principle”); delusions can be read as a failed attempt to reduce uncertainty by imposing order.	VERIFIED	Friston K. “The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11(2):127–138 (2010). DOI 10.1038/nrn2787. Applied here as interpretation, per the predictive-processing account.
Schizophrenia affects roughly 1% of people over a lifetime.	ATTRIBUTED	Lifetime prevalence commonly cited at ~0.3–1% (varies by definition and study). NH figure (“more than ten thousand”) is a rounded estimate applying ~1% to the state population (~1.4M); presented as approximate, not a case count.
New Hampshire has a documented mental-health treatment bottleneck (ER boarding, shortage of psychiatric beds/clinicians).	ATTRIBUTED	Characterized from GSR’s prior health coverage and widely reported NH conditions; not re-verified against a single primary dataset in this piece. Readers should consult current NH DHHS reporting for figures.
NH Rapid Response Access Point crisis line: 1-833-710-6477; national 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.	ATTRIBUTED	Publicly published crisis resources. Verify the current NH Rapid Response number via NH DHHS before relying on it in print.

Editor’s note: This is an explainer grounded in the peer-reviewed neuroscience and psychiatry of psychosis; every load-bearing scientific claim is sourced to a primary paper read directly and listed in the fact-check table above. Two figures are marked ATTRIBUTED rather than VERIFIED: the ~1% lifetime prevalence of schizophrenia (and the rounded New Hampshire estimate derived from it), which varies by definition, and the characterization of New Hampshire’s mental-health access problems, drawn from prior GSR coverage rather than re-verified here against a single primary dataset. The crisis-line numbers should be confirmed against current NH DHHS listings before use. Granite State Report corrects errors promptly; email granitestatereport@gmail.com.