What are the difference between illusion, hallucinations, and delusions??
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Illusions – tricking your brain into seeing something that isn’t there. Optical illusions work on everyone, they’re not a sign that there’s anything wrong. An example is [this one](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/Checker_shadow_illusion.svg) where it looks like squares A and B are different colours but they’re actually the exact same colour. It’s just a result of the way the brain perceives colour.
A hallucination is specific to an individual. If I’m hallucinating something, you can’t see it. That’s because it’s created entirely within the brain, and not the result of a certain image being made to trick you, or of weird optical phenomena. Note that hallucinations aren’t always visual, they can be auditory as well. I’ve had auditory hallucinations after waking up, they’re freaky but not that bad.
A delusion is a long-term consistent false belief. A common one for people with schizophrenia is that they believe that they’re being followed or watched (e.g. by a government agency) even though there’s no reason for them to believe that and nothing to suggest it’s true. A key part is that it’s actually firmly held despite evidence to the contrary. Someone just claiming to believe something weird isn’t a delusion, nor is somebody being tricked into believing something by a dishonest person. If somebody believes the Earth is flat because they think they’ve seen evidence supporting it–even if the evidence is bad, it’s still something they considered and came to using logic, albeit faulty logic, whereas a delusion in the context of mental illness is usually completely divorced from any sort of logic or evidence.
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