When seven-year-old Rachel looked into the mirror one morning, she saw a nightmarish creature looking back at her. Without warning, teenager Jacqui heard voices telling her what to do. Oxford scholar David walked into his lab one afternoon and saw hideous rat-like creatures running around. Like millions of others, they had all developed psychosis. But why? For hundreds of years, psychiatry has treated voices and hallucinations as an enemy. But now,...

This is an extraordinary documentary about the lives of those who live and work in the unit for difficult patients in a psychiatric hospital. We go behind closed doors to examine a facility that takes care of some of the most dangerous patients who are suffering from severe mental disorders and need of 24-hour surveillance. With unique and exclusive testimonies from families, doctors, and the patients themselves, what emerges is a comprehensive depiction...

A psychiatrist treats a young man who believes he is Don Juan, the greatest lover of all time.

It was a wedding born of a terrible act of violence. In 1999 Sean Clifton, in a psychotic frenzy, tried to stab to death a complete stranger, “the prettiest girl he’d seen,” at a mall in Cornwall Ontario. Most of those involved in the violence have been invited to the wedding. For some the wounds have never healed. Can they set aside their anger and fears for the occasion? This extraordinary gathering—and the dark secrets beneath the revelry—are...

While gripped by psychosis, a troubled young man stabs a complete stranger six times in a crowded shopping mall. Declared not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder, the young man, Sean Clifton, is confined to a forensic mental health institution. His victim, Julie Bouvier, miraculously survives, haunted by nightmares but relieved that her attacker has been locked safely away. Twelve years later, she is terrified to learn that Sean is...

An army of fairy space probes have returned to Earth reprogrammed to destroy Atlantis and only Artemis Fowl can stop them. As he races to save the subaquatic city, he must also combat an onslaught of obsessive compulsive and delusional disorders, both byproducts of prodigious intellect and immense stress.

Toby is a disillusioned director, currently heading commericals, that becomes pulled into a world of fantasy and memory when he's reunited with a Spanish cobbler who he cast as Don Quixote in a student film years earlier. The old man now believes himself to be the legendary character, and Toby to be Sancho Panza, who must play along with the delusion as he also attempts to fulfill his professional duties and rescue a young woman who believed his seductive...

From the award-winning author of A Splendid Exchange, a fascinating new history of financial and religious mass manias over the past five centuries "We are the apes who tell stories," writes William Bernstein. "And no matter how misleading the narrative, if it is compelling enough it will nearly always trump the facts." As Bernstein shows in his eloquent and persuasive new book, The Delusions of Crowds, throughout human history compelling stories...