Medication
If the separation alone is not working, antipsychotics are often prescribed for a short time to prevent the delusions. Antipsychotics are medications that reduce or relieve symptoms of psychosis such as delusions or hallucinations (seeing or hearing something that is not there). Other uses of antipsychotics include stabilizing moods for people with mood swings and mood disorders ( i.e. in bipolar patients), reducing anxiety in anxiety disorders, and lessening tics in people with Tourettes. Antipsychotics do not cure psychosis, but they do help reduce symptoms; when paired with therapy, the person with the condition has the best chance of recovering. While antipsychotics are powerful, and often effective, they do have side effects, such as inducing involuntary movements. They should only be taken if absolutely required, and under the supervision of a psychiatrist. Therapy
The two most common forms of therapy for people with shared delusional disorder are personal and family therapy.Personal therapy is one-on-one counseling that focuses on building a relationship between the counselor and the patient, and aims to create a positive environment where the patient feels that they can speak freely and truthfully. This is advantageous, as the counselor can usually get more information out of the patient to get a better idea of how to help them. Additionally, if the patient trusts what the counselor says, disproving the delusion will be easier.Family therapy is a technique in which the entire family comes into therapy together to work on their relationships, and to find ways to eliminate the delusion within the family dynamic.
Various sub-classifications of folie à deux have been proposed to describe how the delusional belief comes to be held by more than one person:
Folie imposée
Where a dominant person (known as the primary, inducer, or principal) initially forms a delusional belief during a psychotic episode and imposes it on another person or persons (the secondary, acceptor, or associate) with the assumption that the secondary person might not have become deluded if left to his or her own devices. If the parties are admitted to hospital separately, then the delusions in the person with the induced beliefs usually resolve without the need of medication. Folie simultanée
Either the situation where two people considered to independently experience psychosis influence the content of each others delusions so they become identical or strikingly similar, or one in which two people "morbidly predisposed" to delusional psychosis mutually trigger symptoms in each other.Folie à deux and its more populous derivatives are psychiatric curiosities. The current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders states that a person cannot be diagnosed as being delusional if the belief in question is one "ordinarily accepted by other members of the persons culture or subculture." It is not clear at what point a belief considered to be delusional escapes from the folie à... diagnostic category and becomes legitimate because of the number of people holding it.