Perpetual Cognitive Dissonance

There’s a clinical term in psychology, which in the vernacular would be described with the phrase, “I think I am going crazy.” This is “cognitive dissonance.” I have actually seen this term show up in casual reading more often in the past couple of years than in all the years before. It seems to have become a rather common utterance.

I am not sure if I will be using the term correctly in this article because in its purest form it describes a cognitive malfunction which occurs when a person creates a story in their mind that doesn’t match reality. There is an assumption in this definition that there is an objective reality to compare it to, and that reality, as defined here, is stable and not subject to multiple interpretations. Although this isn’t really important because you can still experience cognitive dissonance if both the “story” and what is perceived as “reality” is illusory. Thus cognitive dissonance verges on another clinical term, psychosis.