Sometimes they are threatening, punitive, frightening, and may command the individual to do things that may be harmful. Delusions are strange and steadfast beliefs that are held only by the observer and that remain despite obvious evidence to the contrary. For example, red and green traffic signals may be interpreted by someone with schizophrenia as instructions from space aliens. They believe that they are being watched, spied upon, or plotted against. A common delusion is that one's thoughts are being broadcast over the radio or television, or that other people are controlling the ill person's thoughts.
Delusions are resistant to reason.
Thought disorder refers to problems in the way that a person with schizophrenia processes and organizes thoughts. For example, the person may be unable to connect thoughts into logical sequences. Because thinking is disorganized and fragmented, the ill person's speech is often incoherent and illogical. The result may be something like laughing when speaking of sombre or frightening events. Altered sense of self is a term describing a blurring of the ill person's feeling of who he or she is.