Crazy people aren’t talking to you. They are engaging with an internalized representation of you and in their head they are imagining how the outcome will be. Schizophrenia means ‘false memories’.

Basically the outcome being they mis-remember, hallucinate, delude themselves, these share similar themes, but the point being. They have their own distorted view of reality, and it’s not you that they are engaging with, not you directly anyways, it’s these manifestations that are conjured up from false memories. Similar to limerence and crystallization. There is a term for it in Borderline, where people have a hard time making malleable impressions of people. Object constancy.

I’m not saying all schizophrenic people are crazy and/or all crazy people are schizophrenic, I’m simply pulling out a symptom that I believe has cross coverage across disorders that those who are classed as “crazy” likely experience.