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The man was 23 when the delusions came on. He became convinced that his thoughts were leaking out of his head and that other people could hear them. When he watched television, he thought the actors were signaling him, trying to communicate. He became irritable and anxious and couldn’t sleep. Dr. Tsuyoshi Miyaoka, a psychiatrist treating him at the Shimane University School of Medicine in Japan, eventually diagnosed

One day in February 2009, a 13-year-old boy named Sasha Egger started thinking that people were coming to hurt his family. His mother, Helen, watched with mounting panic that evening as her previously healthy son forgot the rules to Uno, his favorite card game, while playing it. She began making frantic phone calls the next morning. By then, Sasha was shuffling aimlessly around the yard, shredding paper and stuffing

IN THE SUMMER OF 2010, Ben Blackwell, a five-year-old living near Dublin, Ireland, began complaining of headaches and a squealing noise in his head. And even though he’d stopped taking naps three years earlier, he now randomly fell asleep—while watching television, reading a book, sitting in the car. When Ben’s parents, James and Natalie, succeeded in rousing him, he often snarled at them and seemed terrified. But a