It now appears that many aspects of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, etc. (see below) are outdated, irrelevant, and perhaps a bit silly. Their "diagnoses" apply to individual human beings. We now see that entire societies can be deluded and suffer from severe mental disorders.

Richard Koenigsberg

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The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV, 2000, cited in the “Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy”) defines a delusion as a

false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everybody else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture.

Delusions are beliefs “held with great conviction in spite of little empirical support.” A delusion is a “false belief based on incorrect inferences about external reality that is firmly sustained.” A person is deluded when he hold a particular belief with a “degree of firmness utterly unwarranted by the evidence at hand.”