Sense of Reality

What is reality and what how does one define existence? It's an abstract question, but the truth is that each of us have a different sense of reality and even meaning in our lives. For one person, reality might be about basic survival--finding food, shelter and water on a daily basis. For me, it's dealing with raising money for a movie, and living here in LA. For a good friend of mine who has a pretty bad case of paranoid schizophrenia, it's a about a "secret project" that no one knows about and that he can't tell us about. He's hiding out from people, and truly believes that there is conspiracy against him which involves someone logging into his email and monitoring his phone calls. I hesitated to blog about this whole thing because it's a highly personal matter, but on another level, it's preoccupied my thoughts more than I can even explain lately. Even more so, because some friends and I recently had an intervention where we tried to convince him to see a doctor. The conversation was like talking to a brick wall--he turned the story around on us, claiming that our argument that he is displaying all of the classic signs of the illness and that he should see a doctor was invalid. In fact, he kept telling us that we needed to come up with a new "story," a more creative reason for him to see a doctor. To him, nothing is wrong and he does not need to see a doctor. It's fascinating to me how the mind takes over and alters a person's idea of existence. Prior to schizophrenia, this person was an extremely high functioning member of society, someone who was the creme of the crop in terms of his ideas and abilities. Now, he is hiding out in his brother's apartment and sometimes wandering to friends' homes, walking around believing that he is being followed by people in this conspiracy. This whole situation makes me sad, particularly because there is no way to rationalize with a person in this state of mind. None. They have no doubts about their own sense of existence and reality and no one and really fuck with that. In fact, during the intervention, we brought up this whole point, that most of us question our own existence and sense of reality on a daily basis. He said he did not and that he did not want to. It's impossible to screw around with that.