United States of Paranoia: A growing tribe of troubled minds

Also where the money is as well (vs. Psychiatry).

I used to howl at the early SNL -- well, when they were "on"; individual skits were always hit and miss. Over subsequent "generations", it came to the point where I could no longer watch it.

I've ended up feeling similar about a significant portion of mainstream "comedy" films.

Eventually, I realized: It used to be, even when the portrayals were sometimes a bit vicious, that we, the audience, guided by the writers and actors, were laughing with them.

That changed: Now, much of comedy is taking grossly stereotypical portrayals and laughing at them.

Laughing with, we acknowledge our... weaknesses, flaws, strengths, human-ness, and bond through shared laughter over them. Defuse the discomfort and tension.

Laughing at, we define and separate into groups: "Us" versus "them". And those laughing, as the "us", bond through the process of excluding the "them".

Society's never been easy. But this part of it -- emblematic, for me -- has turned into a nastier place, in the U.S. media.

I can imagine kids online would eat these folks up without realizing what they're doing.

Do mental health professionals recommend that paranoid people take breaks from the internet?

I like to debate online. I try to do it in the most respectful way possible. After reading this story, I imagine that a paranoid person could perceive disagreement as an attack.

Food for thought for me. Thanks for sharing your experience.

I think a good type of treatment for this would be body cameras and mikes which a therapist could review with a patient and provide them with rational explanations.

Which might make you an obsolete example of a sane social citizen unable to function in a changed bizarro anti-social society.

Still, there's seeing a culture for what it is and then there's running from invisible monsters. I think we can agree that most of the folks from the article need some healing.

There is obviously a spectrum between fully social and fully anti-social, and it is important to find out where you fit on that. There is always value, however, in avoiding being on the far end of the anti-social spectrum. Having our thinking challenged by real people, with real interaction, is important to our mental health.

I don't know too many (3/5) of the things to which you link, and I love Adam Curtis dearly, but it seems like there's always a hint of paranoia to those things.

Filtering advertising is something that just seems like a good idea to me.

Someone is always going to disagree and trying to accommodate extreme fringe beliefs basically prevents you from communicating accurately. Worse it adds a fake air of legitimacy to every wack-job out there.

People being bigots with words over the internet is better than lynching or public beatings imo.

I think this is built into the relatively libertarian structure of the internet. From the 1990s to mid-2000s, if you cared about information, politics, art or culture at all, the project was to get rid of filters and gatekeepers. To increasing the number of voices that can be heard and attract a large audience.

But when you encounter a group like the "gang-stalking victims" then you realize this has its problems. I first encountered such a group in the late 1990s - people who claimed to be victims of "psychotronic" devices implanted in their heads. I had a moment of "Oh, shit, this is what the future is going to be, isn't it?".

I don't need to show why the pluralistic internet has had good effects. But some problems are starting to overtake the benefits. We're all in one filter bubble or another now. And we're discovering how filterless media is dangerously vulnerable to demagoguery.

I'm not sure disintermediation is important now. Maybe we need re-intermediation. Some mechanism that, without silencing alternative voices, also forces a reasoned consensus on events. Much as Wikipedia does, but without the reliance on dying institutions such as ad-supported newspapers, and faster than waiting for an academic to write a book or scientific paper.

Just because we like to push things under the rug, doesn't mean there aren't social (and environmental) factors to it either...

I trust modern medical science on this area as much as I would trust string theory if on top of a verification-free playground for their thoughts they also had huge normative and financial motivation to make up shit -- that is, not so much at all.

Being shot is always deadly, I think you meant to say he was not fatally shot.

EDIT: This is not a point of idle pedanticism, it's a very common misconception that there are 'safe' places to shoot a human body such as the shoulder. There are no safe places to shoot somebody, all shots taken by police are shots to kill.

https://www.pfoa.co.uk/110/shooting-to-wound

After a few days, I woke up just after sunrise and discovered an eerie silence. I realized that I had been kidnapped and put on a train to some foreign country - they had been coming in every few hours to interrogate me and check my papers as we passed through different territories - but now the train had stopped and I was completely alone.

There was a strange city outside the window and I knew that it was my job to escape - I am a security operative and I'd been taken against my will.

They were putting drugs in me to keep me sedated - I ripped the IV out of my arm and made my way to a closet area where I ripped through supplies until I found street clothes (I realized that there was another sedated agent in the train car as well - he stirred, but I managed not to wake him.)

I snuck out of the train and into the landing tube, which was empty except for some thugs at the far end; I snuck the other way and had made it to the elevators before I was caught.

And gently led back to my hospital room, had the blood cleaned from my arm, and put back into my hospital bed. Where I woke up a few hours later, with memories of this strange dream.

But it wasn't a dream - I did rip out my IV and try to escape from a hospital. There was a strange city outside my window - I had to travel for surgery. And I was conscious when I made my escape and completely and utterly convinced that what I thought was reasonable and real. Of course I was such a valuable individual that they would kidnap me - and that there was an external "they" (or to put it another way "the other") that was doing something to me.

I believed this completely - it was as true to me as my cat (or what I like to think of as my cat, if you prefer) throwing up on the carpet in front of me right now.

But now I know that my cat is not doing this on purpose, nor was he poisoned by the NSA.

Andy, I'm very sorry that you're going through what you're going through, and my experience informs me that what you feel is absolutely real is what is real to you - but there are objective and subjective realities and if you can externalize yourself from the situation you find yourself in, you may discover that coincidences are coincidences and you don't need to find a hypothesis to fit a random pattern.

I think that pareidolia can be applied to situations and feelings as well as visual artifacts. Humans pattern match compulsively.

Individual surveillance of course happens - but it probably isn't happening to most of these people. It isn't reasonable.

Group therapy works for other stuff

(I'm joking and not an MD, please don't take this seriously)

A variant on the same joke: I had a friend who used to occasionally say

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you!"

which always made me laugh. I laugh still but less, because our surveillance society has now reduced the vague "they" to government/police agencies who seem relentlessy devoted to shredding any concept of privacy that ever existed in Western thought.

And the OP is right: the revelation of so much previously-unrevealed surveillance by government and law-enforcement can only, to someone who is from suspicious to paranoid, increase their suspicions or in some cases _prove_ (to them) their fears. When I was a child I feared because my parents told me that "God is watching you!"; today I fear because God knows who's watching me! At least, in the case of "God", I understood his intentions.

  Morgellons successfully lobbied members of the U.S. Congress     
  and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 
  to investigate the condition in 2006.[4][9] 

Believing that you were randomly selected for a form of psychological terror that would take enormous resources from the attacker is a pretty clear sign you are delusional.

This is a group of people with mental health issues that unfortunately also self sustain by suggesting relatives are "in on it" and that seeking help is bad.

Judging by the comments in StalkinVictim's video, this is typical: the "victims" have no idea why they are special to the stalkers, but are quick to jump to conclusions anyway. To me this is a form of alienation and possibly mental illness. They see the patterns they already expect to see.

Each day I take the subway I look at random strangers, and random strangers look at me. When someone stares at me longer than normal, I just assume they are either lost in thought (and just happened to rest their eyes on me), or my hair looks funny, or they like my clothes, or maybe I resemble someone they know. People with paranoia tend to think they are being stalked, which is the least reasonable assumption to make.

I suppose there is no way you can prove to them they aren't really being stalked. They base their assumption on the flimsiest of evidences; it's their brain that's making the unwarranted connections.

It'd be something innocuous-sounding like the fluffy unicorn program, FUP

Of course, if we have medication that has been proven to work without side-effects, I'd be all in favor.

And for most people they need to be doing other stuff before using the meds. Working through sleep hygiene first.

The anti-psychotic meds are pretty harsh. They have harsh side effects. And it's hard to work out the correct dose. And, again, they're part of a package of care. A bunch of other stuff should be happening for people who need to take mental health meds (and for the people who care[1] for them).

[1] "Carer" in UK is someone who provides care but who is not paid to do so. Normally a relative or spouse.

There is OTC sleep meds, benadryl is the main one.

Early in the game, you'd encounter various disheveled homeless characters, some clearly mentally ill. Many would ramble about seemingly far-fetched conspiracies.

In my opinion, that was one of the best narrative and immersion devices in the history of interactive entertainment.

Transitioning as a solution to gender dysphoria works. It drastically increases the quality of life of those who suffer from it. Sure, in an ideal world where we had full knowledge of human biology and an ability to edit the brain, we'd treat gender dysphoria simply by making people believe they were the "correct" gender. But lacking that ability, we do the next best thing possible that we can do.

On the other hand, you can't cure paranoid schizophrenics in any sort of similar way.

So first off, what if you applied the same question to sexuality? We could easily argue that gay people are 'mentally ill' and need to be 'treated.' In fact, for years in the United States, that's exactly what we did. Gay people (and trans people) were frequently [subjected to electro-shock therapy to 'cure' them][]. We can even take it further than that. If I come by my political beliefs by reason, then surely anyone who disagrees with me politically must therefore be insane. So maybe we should give those damned INSERT_POLITICAL_PARTY_HERE electro-shock too, right? Just until they see our way of looking at things.

Clearly, there's a line somewhere between treating someone's disease and treating _who they are_. Some argue that that line is 'posing a danger to oneself or others,' but that brings up the confusing subject of assisted suicide, which is a whole other discussion. There's also some that argue that we only treat 'abnormality' and 'normal' is simply whatever the majority of people are, but that doesn't really solve either of the cases above, because trans people, gay people, and political dissidents are generally speaking the minority everywhere. There's also lots of other possible rules that don't really makes sense either.

Personally, I'm inclined to believe that there currently aren't any good answers to these questions and there won't be any until the field neuroscience advances. When we can look at people's brains and genuinely study how they work, a lot of stuff becomes more clear. In the case of transsexuality, [some brain structures have already been identified][] that exhibit one pattern in women and another in men and tend to match along a person's _identified_ gender rather their _assigned_ gender. That provides some evidence for the concept of _neurological sex_ which was already a topic of discussion among researchers in the area of gender studies even before these structures were identified.

So, what do these structures mean? How does gender work in the brain? How does anything work in the brain? Where is the line between sane and insane? Honestly, I don't know, but I think we'll have a better idea in a few decades, and until then, let's just try to be understanding and compassionate with our fellow human beings.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Whipping-Girl-Transsexual-Scapegoatin... [2]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jamie-scot/shock-the-gay-away-... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_transsexualism#Brain...

A delusionally paranoid person would make a claim: "There are dozens of people following me with the goal to ruin my life". Their perception isn't possible to reconcile with the objective reality of "No one is following you, and no one just whispered 'Now you see how it works' into your ear."

In the first case, the person isn't delusional about objective facts, but their subjective interpretation is unusual. In the second case, the person and an outside observer would disagree about things that you'd expect to be objective facts. If the first person told you "No, that's not a penis", then the two people would be equally unreasonable.

The difference is that it's difficult to apply objective reason to subjective experience.

Just because governments can do bad things isn't proof that a particular bad thing happened from the government.