I'm a psychiatrist. When I went to med school I thought I would go the radiology route, because that's where all the cool tech is, but one of the things that drew me in was the unexpected consistency in the themes of severe mental illness. Paranoia is, on an academic level, a fascinating phenomenon. It also causes a lot of suffering.
Please remember that these kinds of communities have sprung up in the context of the ongoing stigma of mental illness, and the limitations of present medications for psychosis (most have unpleasant side-effects). Other contributors are a mistrust of authority, and the always-complicated balance between individual liberties and involuntary treatment.
Finally, a plea for some compassion. Many of these people live a deeply tormented life, and feel like they can't trust anyone. It's a hard existence for both them and their families. It might seem like a humorous phenomenon, but there's a lot of suffering here.
I think a huge source of blame lies in organizations like the NSA/CIA that have proven to be deceptive / secretive / manipulative. There is a long history of secret experiements done by government that breeds distrust. Add mental health issues and the internet and you have a cauldron which can easily brew up this sort of thing.
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.
[As a disclaimer, the following is not an elaborate troll. When I was a practicing scholar of American Literature, psychoanalysis was one of my areas of specialization. What I write below is/was characteristic of psychoanalytic thought in the context of literary and cultural studies. Having left academia 7 years ago, I can see how some of my fellow HNers might be suspicious of such a seemingly convoluted and obtuse form of discourse.]
Though you've been downvoted, the structure of your seemingly casual observation is validated by some of the most renown psychoanalytic and philosophical thinkers of the 20th and 21st centuries. (In the US, psychoanalysis is largely repudiated as a therapeutic pathway for severe mental illness such as paranoid schizophrenia. However, philosophy and psychoanalytic thinking can provide occasionally valuable insights into the nature of human psychology, each capable of being productive and provocative in equal measure.)
In _Jacques Lacan's Four Discourses_ (Lacan has been referred to as the "French Freud"), Slavoj Zizek asks readers to
> Recall, again, Lacan's outrageous statements that, even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological. [0]
This is probably a misattribution by Zizek (or a conflation) since Sigmund Freud makes the comparison in the _Standard Edition_ (XVIII, 226).
> Freud suggests that a jealous husband who is obsessed with the idea that his wife is cheating on him can be described as paranoid even if it turns out that his wife is cheating on him. [1]
Without question, the priapic over-concern with the possibility of spousal infidelity is characteristic of masculinist psychoanalytic discourse. However, the kernel of truth in this is that one's internal representation is separate from reality, however closely the two may match. In other words, paranoia is pathological (belief in gang-stalking) even if it is matched by a dysfunctional reality (CIA surveillance) and this can be seen in the opposite case of a naive subject who neither suspects nor fears being surveilled despite being surveilled in reality (e.g. a psychologically healthy subject who is targeted by state surveillance).
In short, paranoid fantasies may in fact be matched by reality, but that does not make the paranoid fantasies any less paranoid. Conversely, blissful ignorance may be contradicted by reality, but that does not necessarily make the subject any less blissful.
(As a bonus, the paragraph from which the Zizek quote is drawn continues in its next sentence to explain how anti-Semitism draws upon psychopathological thinking to validate its ideological end. In other words, anti-Semitism for Zizek is structurally/phenomenologically identical to paranoia.)
It seems to play right into paranoid fantasy, and perhaps precipitate it in cases, that to be ignorant of a hostile cultural reality is tagged as "mentally healthy".
I guess another way to think about it is that irrational fears remain irrational even if they turn out to be true. If you don't have a reasonable justification for your fears, then it is purely a coincidence that the fears happen to be true.
I'd say that's not another way to think about it rather than exactly what mistersquid was saying, stripped of all the psychobabble (and I say that with degree of affection for French Fraud and his ilk).
Something similar can be seen in depression. I've gone through multiple periods of depression, and I noticed quite a difference in quality between them. While it can probably not be generalized, I noticed that the stronger, more vivid and often shorter periods of depression often least matched reality in hindsight, whereas the dragging, nagging, longer periods of depression often felt justified even in hindsight. Even now, for example, I don't feel that my perspective has fundamentally changed since my last long period of depression; I just don't feel bad about it.
The fact that I felt bad about a situation that other people don't feel bad about was what made me 'someone dealing with depression', not the objective facts of my life.
Realizing this, combined with buddhist thought and practice, has made it easier for me to deal with depression, social anxiety (which often includes quite a bit of paranoia), and my changing moods in general.
Likely, since even in a situation where they were the subject of a real campaign, inducing clinical degree of paranoia would very likely be an objective.
> 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.
That just means the therapist has been got to and is now One of Them.
You know someone who has believed they were recording something that they were not? Were they watching the output of the recording, while still believing "it" was occurring?
The person recording clearly believes he's captured evidence of spys tracking him, yet the footage seems to show an ordinary trip to the subway with fellow pedestrians minding their own business. And there seem to be many other videos along those same lines.
I hadn't clicked that link before. The narrator doesn't make many substantive claims that can be tested. He mostly just says a particular person was there, which the video seems to show.
I was thinking of some of the more testable claims made in the article. For instance, the person who claimed that their behavior was being mimicked.
I have been in that position, the person when asked will usually just reinforce their position with a statement like "It was there, I swear it was.", fault their recording technique, or their equipment.
Believing your mind is playing tricks on you is really the last ditch effort at rationalizing something for most people. They don't come to that conclusion easily without some sort of history or practice doing so.
I've noticed a change in the general tone of comedy in U.S. media society, in the past some decades. For me, it was exemplified in the changes that occurred on the broadcast television show, "Saturday Night Live".
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 think I know what you mean -- Even if on the surface he appears to be making fun of Joe Cocker [1], Belushi's impersonation was the deepest form of respect [2] [3]! Trump's impersonation of Serge Kovaleski [4], on the other hand...
I'd respect him more if he had the nerve to do his "politically incorrect" impression of Serge Kovaleski to his face on stage during a live broadcast of SNL, just the way John Belushi performed his Joe Cocker impression, instead of cowardly lying after the fact that he didn't know the reporter he was making fun of was disabled.
Love the sentiment, need data on the accuracy. Even during the golden years of SNL, you had sketch artists like Chris Farley whom we were constantly being asked to laugh AT. And in Farley's case, it contributed to mental illness and his eventual death.
Edit:I was thinking of the Murray/Belushi days and don't know why I thought Farley was around the same time
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.
Mine does, yes. It's not really "get away from the internet", but more a recommendation for mindfulness, which includes getting away from stressors such as the internet.
Well that's cool you got into mindfulness. I'm into it too. During a debate, if I notice the other person is getting upset and I recommend mindfulness, in my experience, that person rejects it. He or she is already in "disagree with everything studentrob says" mode
I find it odd and a bit ironic that the moment we identify someone who could benefit most from something like mindfulness can be a time when they're most likely to reject it. Perhaps this is the struggle of psychology and education in a nutshell. It's most useful when the student seeks it out.
Not just the ongoing stigma of mental illness, but the near-total destruction of our mental health infrastructure in the US since the 80's. We've seemingly made the choice that unless you're fabulously wealthy or connected and can afford exceptional private treatment, your major options are to be a family burden, in prison, or indigent.
And, we make physical health care harder and harder to access. Physical injuries and illnesses get poorer or no treatment, many then resulting in mental and emotional burdens.
There is no "social contract" anymore. So yeah, every poor bastard for themself.
I keep wondering how long it's going to take before even the super-rich remember the kind of world that inevitably creates for everyone, the festering instability.
I agree, and I'm not suggesting that we turn the clock back to pre-1980's. The solution though, was no more to throw open the doors and say "To hell with this", than it would be with our broken prison system now, right? We needed to reform it, replace it, alongside our prisons.
We have to get over our need to punish, and start to count the dollars, realize that they can improve and save lives, and start rehabilitating. We can't do that when we have pathological cases mixed in with petty criminals, passionate "one-timers" and the like.
By the same token, we can't stop mass shootings when our standard treatment for schizophrenics without money is, "Find a nice streetcorner buddy." Most will die miserably, but of course a few will snap.
I had a close relative experience a psychotic episode and require hospitalization, it was an incredibly intense experience all around. And as you say drugs are very crude tools with unpleasant side-effects, from my personal observation I have to wonder whether those drugs actually help more than they hurt, on average. It's somewhat shocking how backward and regressive our society and medical establishment still is in their approaches to psychiatric issues. At best we're only a few steps out of the dark ages and still fumbling around.
> from my personal observation I have to wonder whether those drugs actually help more than they hurt, on average.
From my own personal observations, I am certain these drugs do a lot of damage.
I've managed to get my girlfriend stabilized with supplements and some safe drugs, and got her into a smaller system to manage her court-ordered treatment. Her new court-ordered psychiatric nurse initially wanted to keep her on the antipsychotic injection, but there was a bureaucratic snafu (pre-authorization) and the injection wore off. After the drugs had lapsed for a month, the psychiatric nurse decided that it wasn't actually necessary.
Robert Whitaker, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic, [1] has looked into the practices of the mental health industry, and makes the case that the standard treatments make people's mental health worse.
It seems pretty obvious that they hurt more than they help, but for many people, the alternative to a lifetime of constant, horrible spiritual anaesthesia is occasional bouts of explosive delusions which lead to behavior that's dangerous to the patient and to others.
You start with a false premise, several of them actually. You posit that drugs are the one and only defense against delusional behavior. And you assume that the drugs mentioned do in fact work as advertised. I've seen with my own eyes, and other people have reported many instances as well, when they've absolutely caused more harm, by enhancing rather than suppressing delusions and hallucinations.
The reality is a lot more complicated. For some people these drugs help. For others it makes things worse. For yet others it's somewhere in between. And measuring the results accurately is incredibly difficult due to the difficulty of objectively determining someone else's cognitive state. Which is difficult enough even when it's something comparatively straightforward, when there are layers of mental illness, trauma, and complex drug interactions at play it becomes a herculean effort. And one that the medical establishment generally lacks the resources and commitment to follow through on. Some people are lucky enough to have loved ones or family members around who can accurately judge what's "normal" and what isn't in someone else's behavior and also put in the effort to find what treatments help or not and maybe shepherd someone to improved health. Many other people only have a few minutes spent on their care and most of their treatment comes out of a generic manual which might as well be a flow chart of "if X prescribe Y". This isn't helped by the widespread stigma, misunderstanding, and misinformation about mental illness that permeates society.
Right now our approach to these issues is like trying to tune a malfunctioning jet engine without any knowledge of how it works and experimenting via trial and error by dumping liquid oxygen or coal dust into the intake. The fact that some people are helped leads us to the incorrect conclusion that we actually know what we're doing instead of just occasionally getting incredibly lucky.
> Right now our approach to these issues is like trying to tune a malfunctioning jet engine without any knowledge of how it works and experimenting via trial and error by dumping liquid oxygen or coal dust into the intake.
That's a good analogy.
I was talking to someone recently, and realized that the "antipsychotics" are essentially speed-governors for people. It's better to fix the actual problem with a car than arbitrarily limiting its top speed. Another analogy is that these drugs are like under-clocking your CPU so it doesn't overheat, instead of replacing the broken fan.
My girlfriend screwed up her brain's metabolism by self-treating her depression with alcohol and stimulants. When the alcohol went away, she became rather psychotic. Her mother (whom she was living with) called the crisis team, and the hospital didn't help things by treating her with antipsychotics, when they should have used coconut oil, nutritional supplements and some of the more useful prescriptions.
My observation is that the practitioners who treated my girlfriend weren't concerned about the behaviors that created the condition (self-medicating depression with alcohol & the street pharmacy), they just prescribed medication in the hope that it would help with the presenting symptom ("psychosis").
She'd stabilize after a few weeks in the mental hospital. When released, she would resume her efforts to treat her own depression, and would shortly end up back in the mental hospital.
My girlfriend got much better when I obtained the supplements and safe drugs that help with the actual causes of her mental exhaustion.
But I don't have her on lockdown, and I can't force her to consistently take what clearly benefits her, nor keep her away from the professionals' bad prescriptions (SSRI's and benzodiazepines) that create more problems for her.
As a side note, are you sure she's not bipolar (specifically bipolar II)? It's easy to misunderstand what bipolar is if you haven't researched it, it's nothing like the pop culture portrayal. Periods of hypomania (in bipolar II) are not "manic", they aren't filled with exuberant happiness, they aren't filled with lots of unusual "crazy" activities in most cases. What it actually looks like is usually getting a bit less sleep, getting stuff done more often (which could be as innocuous as reading a book or playing minecraft), maybe increased talkativeness, likely an increase in "risk-taking" behavior (which could be as mild as ordering a few extra things on amazon than normal), and an increase in distractability. All of these things might not be very noticeable, even to the person they're happening to, and might seem normal (as, indeed, they are within the bounds of perfectly "normal" behaviors and not intrinsically destructive) or even positive (which they may in fact be).
However, having bipolar can cause a susceptibility to psychotic incidents and requires different treatments than depression.
Anyway, it seems like much of the medical establishment is still in a very archaic mindset when it comes to treating mental illnesses that involve the potential for violence. Actual quality of life is irrelevant as long as you reduce the likelihood of someone getting physically hurt in the future. Meanwhile, we still use incredibly antiquated drugs like thorazine which are questionably effective and have a mind-numbing list of side effects. Yet the drug companies don't do a whole lot of research on efficacy, safety, or on new drugs because there just isn't much money in it.
> However, having bipolar can cause a susceptibility to psychotic incidents and requires different treatments than depression.
All her psychotic incidents were self-induced with substances. Whatever label gets applied, I suspect one of the root causes of her condition is a dysfunctional pituitary gland. This should be easily treatable, but none of the professionals care.
> Meanwhile, we still use incredibly antiquated drugs like thorazine which are questionably effective and have a mind-numbing list of side effects.
Indeed, "mind-numbing" is certainly on the all these drugs' lists of side effects.
> Yet the drug companies don't do a whole lot of research on efficacy, safety, or on new drugs because there just isn't much money in it.
The newest "antipsychotics" are rather expensive, and one of the best-selling drugs in the world right now is Abilify. There is no financial incentive to research using nutrients and old generic drugs to eliminate the conditions that give rise to psychiatric symptoms.
There are many areas of radiology interventional for example which is aided by but not likely to be taken over by computers. There are threats to any profession but if you look at the earnings from psych vs. radiology it would take a great deal to drive down earning in rad to the level of psych in the near term.
I would imagine the standard radiologist "reading" of xrays for simple fractures, etc. would be ripe for automation. It's already outsourced halfway around the world in some cases, I believe.
I cannot deny I often find myself pigeon-holed into this category, the derision poured upon me to "fix" something has been consistent & unwavering. Problem is, I was always more interested in books/work over socializing before the netz, I don't hear voices in my head besides my inner-monologue(hopefully=not-schizo) and my 'echo chamber' is anything but... I am drawn to alien, re-framed & unique perspectives of the world I live in. My solitude is a result of not being current on the TV shows, my choice to avoid Web2.0 style social(sic) media and a very low consumption fueled lifestyle... all these are past-times for the mass majority. Good for them, if that is what people choose. Good for me for not choosing to do the same. My outlier mentality has subsequently been reinforced by the writings/works of some very smart people. A few examples:
Just so you know, you can live a non-solitary life and not stay up on TV, not be on social media, and live a low consumption life. None of those things preclude interacting with other people.
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.
>My solitude is a result of not being current on the TV shows, my choice to avoid Web2.0 style social(sic) media and a very low consumption fueled lifestyle...
Which might make you an obsolete example of a sane social citizen unable to function in a changed bizarro anti-social society.
Thank you. I'm social enough that people give me strange looks when I describe myself as a loner. I've been accused of posing. As if being a loner is "in" now or something. Everything in my reality is telling me to be more social. But there's a truth that I simply know which apparently has no voice: It feels amazing to spend time alone. Like a lot. I wish more people would speak up about it. Shamelessly. Also, people make the worst faces when I tell them I don't watch TV. I suspect they're concerned that I'm judging them. In both cases people just seem clueless as to how to handle the situation. I guess, compared to the opposite, it is harder to identify with loners and people who don't watch TV...
From what you've written, I believe the issue you face with others' perceptions of you is your tendency to proselytize. It comes through even in this short comment.
When you are truly comfortable in yourself, you won't feel the need to convince others that this is so. And they won't find anything odd about you. In fact they'll be drawn to you, since you have obviously got something they lack.
> When you are truly comfortable in yourself, you won't feel the need to convince others that this is so.
Maybe I'm an introvert or something. I'm not trying to say that spending more time alone is good for everyone. But as someone who is comfortable spending time alone I know it's looked down on by much of society. This is even implied by your comment... Why else would I be uncomfortable with it? I also smoke pot. I'm comfortable with it and I regularly tell people: Unlike they told you in DARE, it won't kill you.
I am very averse to your line of thinking. Generalized and applied indiscriminately it implies that a person should never feel motivated to articulate any opinion they authentically possess.
I did not mean you to stop doing anything. Rather to try to explain why you may be constantly meeting resistance and to offer what might be a more effective route to achieving the same goal.
North Wind still gonna blow, even though the Gentle Sunshine was more effective in removing the man's overcoat.
If people are skeptical they're probably the sort of people who can't handle being alone. Maybe I shouldn't be convincing them of anything. I don't really have a goal. It's not like I make these comments as conversation starters. Someone asks me if I watched Game of Thrones last night and I tell them I don't watch TV. They ask why I didn't attend some social function and I tell them I'm a loner. I was mostly just commenting on the nature of people's reactions. Is it that unheard of for someone to be comfortable alone and to prefer it? I suspect there's some repression at work and I was applauding the GP for resisting it.
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.
I tend to disagree. While it has historically been true(and still holds on a micro level), mass, repetitive exposure to ideas tends to make people co-opt those ideas as their own. The crowd is easily swayed by FUD, the 'four F's'(fight, flight, food, reproduction) and repetition. These triggers have been proven to get eyes on content, sell product and sway opinion. Hence, this is what I see when I do get a glimpse of current popular media. Bad programming, IMO.
Another title for your list is "The Hidden Persuaders".
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.
> it seems like there's always a hint of paranoia to those things.
If you mean the reading list the parent post mentioned, I must disagree. Carl Sagan's books are about scientific divulgation. In fact, "The Demon Haunted World" isn't about conspiracy theories but about the scientific method and how it differs from pseudoscience, and how to avoid falling prey to tempting but irrational ideas (what he calls "The baloney detection kit"). The other book by Sagan is likewise about science, not about persecution or being "an outlier".
Noam Chomsky's book is different. Of course, writings about the control of the media by the few and the manipulation of public opinion can, when looked through the warped lens of someone with a persecution complex, look like confirmation that "they" are after you. But Chomsky isn't paranoid, he is political.
I'm less familiar with the rest of the books, but at a quick glance they don't seem to have a hint of paranoia to me.
I've not read that Sagan book ( nor Dragons of Eden ) , but in general, you're absolutely correct - his are pure scientific storytelling.
I maintain that Adam Curtis, Nassem Taleb and Manufacturing Consent are on a subject in which it's impossible to not be a teeny bit paranoid ( Bernays and propaganda/advertising ) but yes, Chomsky is in general just scholarly. This being said, his work does involve descriptions of systems in which he believes people abuse power.
> I maintain that Adam Curtis, Nassem Taleb and Manufacturing Consent are on a subject in which it's impossible to not be a teeny bit paranoid
I see what you mean, and I find 'teeny bit paranoid' as a concept so intensely frustrating! We're using a word that by definition is extreme, and then use it in a situation where it doesn't really apply (on account of it being a 'teeny bit so'). It's basically 'guilt by association'.
It's akin to calling someone's views a 'teeny bit mysogynic', or 'a teeny bit racist', makes as much sense as 'somewhat unique', but it basically removes any gray area from the discussion.
I understand why and how this happens, but it's so frustratingly effective to shut down any kind of interesting avenue of discussion.
(Edit: it gets worse when, in a conversation, an actual full-blown mysogynist or racist decides to come to your aid, although sometimes the resulting conversation is so farcical to be funny again)
(Edit 2: that one guy with that blog with codex in it that is often posted to HN wrote about this quite eloquently, if I remember correctly)
Absolutely, if you mean the Frontline documentary from 2004. Poignant more so today than when it 1st aired. I'll double check "Hidden Persuaders", though.
Problem is, everyone seems to be emulating the advertizers, selling what they deem to be the best X. These social networks are conditioning people to be salespeople, IMO. I am guilty, too.
"The Hidden Persuaders" is a book by Vance Packard from the late 1950s. It discusses the Bernays phenomenon and how OSS propagandists went into advertising after WWII.
I do "government watchdog" work, have bipolar and have dealt with paranoia on a relatively unhealthy level before and to some extent, now.
It's not fun. It's very hard to determine what's "real", who's telling the truth and who's trying to "get me". I've spoken to my psychiatrist about this multiple times, but every time I bring it up, he says that it's a perfectly rational feeling to have considering what kind of work I'm doing and that thinking through it is all I can do.
To make matters worse, I met up with a journalist the other day to discuss a couple large projects I'm working on. Later in the night, I was mugged. My phone, license and credit cards were stolen. My bag with my laptop, etc wasn't stolen, though. It's very hard to express the sorts of paranoia it caused. The lack of empathy, lack of cops in a usually cop-laden area and a genuine lack of interest in checking city camera footage didn't help.
What's worse is that talking about it makes others consider you a paranoid crazy person. There's very little area for discussion, because the default discussion is, "stop acting crazy", rather than "Let's discuss why you feel this way."
Why not tell your pyschiatrist that you'd like to discuss the details of why you feel that way?
I gather you are looking for someone who will believe you, and without evidence, nobody is likely to believe you, leading you on a deeper and deeper quest for something that passes as real evidence.
I have, and his assessment is that it's basically stress driving something similar to paranoia. Talking about it with friends and posting on places like HN helps, though.
It's kind of a long story why I'm doing a lot of this. After a project I'm (still) working on to analyze parking tickets in Chicago [0], I managed to get invited to Bob Fioretti's [1] office to show them what I found. They really, really liked what I had to show. When I brought up proof of [2] from a FOIA request that they could have used in their campaign, they told me to never mention it again and never contacted me back. It was very odd and gave me a very negative vibe. To make matters worse, they began using parking tickets as a large part of their campaign - without me. A friend suggested that maybe Rahm was involved with Fioretti, which led to an initial request for the mayor's phone records was submitted. The weekend before the election, Fioretti dropped out and gave his support to Rahm, so the negative vibes were possibly accurate.
The initial reason for the request isn't as important to me anymore, though. These days, the strong lack of privacy reciprocation and negative comments such as, "You're naive to think you can do this.", "Stop stalking the mayor." (my family), "You're crazy", "Nothing will come out of this", etc drives me to continue. It's incredibly frustrating, but when I finally got the phone records, a huge weight was lifted, as it showed that those negative comments were largely unjustified.
That said, a lot of people do believe me and do want to help me out. I expect to have a story published in the next month or so thanks to those people.
I'm kicking a bee's nest and finding information through ways that Chicago's mayor's office very clearly didn't think was possible. There is very interesting information in there, and their year and a half long resistance (still ongoing) only makes me think there's more to be found. If one person is angry enough at me for doing this work, then that's all it takes to put me in a dangerous position. Considering how corrupt Illinois and Chicago are, it wouldn't a stretch of the imagination to think that it's possible. The paranoia has nothing to do with "conspiracies", but everything to do with single individuals who don't want to be called out.
Over a week, three very, very strange things happened, and I've only mentioned one online. I've talked to my psychiatrist about it. He agrees that what I'm feeling isn't irrational paranoia.
Edit: it's also worth noting that nobody else has been able to get this before, and for good reason.
I think you'd find if you dig into any of the corrupt "Clinton crowd" like Rahm too deeply you'd certainly get kickback.
Many of the Clinton camp followers have died in suspicious circumstances over the past few decades when they were being dragged into court, etc.
This isn't paranoia, it's noting things that have clearly happened (though not reported in mainstream media, who are clearly not interested in digging into this stuff for obvious reasons).
In an odd way, thank you. This is a very difficult subject to discuss and it's very useful to read confirmations of these thoughts.
I had a conversation with a hired-gun researcher to find information on politicians to help others win elections, etc. He told me that nobody within their right journalistic mind would use FOIA to any large extent just because of the time it takes. Besides the potential dangers involved, the time-to-request-fulfilment is one of the larger reasons I'm doing this sort of work. If journalists aren't able to easily gather information within the public domain, then there are clear issues that need to be resolved.
Sounds like your psychiatrist is enabling your delusions. I really doubt this information is interesting enough for the mayor to send out a hitsquad on you.
I will probably not be convinced to believe these group of people, but I am troubled by the fact that the author has written this article with the pre-assumption that these people are absolutely, without any doubt, sick and being paranoid.
When you are covering a story where there are conflicting views, it is not nice to pick one side and see the opposing view as an illness that needs to be treated. It is just not right, no matter how absurd the opposing view sounds to you.
Always trying to present a 'balanced' view is an extreme form of bias. 10 million well informed people on one side 10 fools on the other. Let's give them equal air time.
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.
By your standard, truth is determined by consensus. Ignore the number people involved, because it's irrelevant, and just look at ideas and arguments.
It's not about creating a numerical balance between groups of people with differing views, it's about refining an idea by challenging it. If those 10 people really are wrong then the evidence will dismiss their point immediately and you have nothing to worry about.
Presenting an idea without challenging it, or worse challenging it with straw man, makes your work less persuasive.
I can find plenty of people that think today is Tuesday, but it's consensious among the informed that it's Sunday. Should I really present a counter argument to the date?
Sunday is not an objective fact - it's a human convention. Two things that couldn't be more opposite things, in that one doesn't change no matter what people say, and the other is precisely defined by what people say.
You did not contidict me as it can be two dates at the same time in different locations. Which circles back to this as I don't need to report every fact just those relevant to a given story.
Indeed. Simply defining where the "mid-point" on an issue is represents a very strong power in controlling how the issue is portrayed. Some do this intentionally, others do it in an attempt to be "objective" while still letting their implicit framing of the issue color how it is handled and presented.
I don't think this particular case is an issue of the "mid-point". You can avoid giving opinions and focus on the facts. In fact many good news articles are almost entirely facts, with a little bit of opinions in a separate section.
Here is how I would outline this article:
- There is this group of people who shares the same idea who are thought to be crazy. (Intro)
- They have attracted some attention and grown in numbers recently. (Background)
- Medical experts who study them think they are delusional. (Mainstream view)
- This group of people denies such claims and provide personal recounts. (Alternative view)
The violent part is only boarder line related to the main issue as it was an exception. So it should only be briefly mentioned, instead of being given an entire section.
> 10 million people on one side 10 people on the other.
10 million who are not involved in the slightest and would not even know about this without seeing it in the news.
So your argument is, since x billion (not just million) people don't know something we can already conclude it doesn't exist.
I'm attacking your numbers argument, nothing else.
And your "someone will always disagree" is completely out of place - it's true about about something not present in this story at all. So by throwing in some random true fact you made your 2nd argument.
Last, the comparison with "climate deniers" (others in this thread) is bogus too: The difference is that topic was WAS discussed at great length - and the "deniers" did get heard. So yes, after hearing all sides there is no need to give everyone equal time. In this story however we hear about it for the very first time, and while I certainly don't expect to give them equal time for their views, and personally would not bother one iota, it makes me wonder:
What happens when we hear such stories and always automatically assume they are wrong? For me it's not about this one single story, but how we handle such stories in general. Always throwing the "majority opinion" view around seems misguided. I'm not much concerned about this particular case, but about the generalities thrown around here like the the "10 million people" argument above. Just because those people are sick doesn't make your justification/reasoning correct - somebody else being wrong doesn't make you right automatically!
There's a whole bunch of different heuristics we can use to make a judgement on this one.
"Most people don't believe this" is a pretty poor standard for evidence. "No logical reason for these particular people to be stalked has been identified, the only people that believe this activity is actually taking place appear to be those claiming to actually suffer from it; experts in mental illness who have studied some of the individuals claiming to experience the phenomena note that they are exhibiting well-established symptoms of mental illnesses" is a pretty good standard of evidence.
Unlike most almost-certainly-incorrect beliefs, it also appears that those who come to adopt this one genuinely suffer from it, so I'm not even convinced the assumption that we should consider it pretty plausible and encourage both sides of the argument to publicise their case would be a benign one. (A corollary of this is that even in the staggeringly unlikely event that independent evidence can be found that some shadowy group actually is attempting to unsettle a particular individual by sending out minions to gas stations to mimic their actions, they'd probably feel even more intimidated for receiving that confirmation)
I don't know if you've ever experienced psychosis, but this story sounds very familiar to those who have. It would be like reporting on people in rehab and writing under the assumption that maybe no one really has a problem with heroin and it would be fine to shoot up just a little bit from time to time.
If you were to report on climate change deniers, would you not focus on the fact that they are denying something that overwhelming scientific evidence attests to? Or if somebody claimed the earth was flat, would your report say, "gee, there's an opposing view, guess we'll never know who's right"?
In American that is exactly what the climate change deniers and young earth creationists demand - that we give equal time to their ideas. "Teach the controversy."
The controversy only exists in the mind of that minority, and their extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof (Thanks, Carl Sagan) - the birthers, climate change deniers, creationists trump supporters and spoon benders fail to meet the minimum criteria, but their bombastic temperaments make for good press coverage, which keeps them in the headlines and in our collective consciousness.
We should not be teaching blindly following an absolute in any science. There is always doubt, and if counter evidence exists it should be presented not swept under the rug because a majority disagree.
Equal time? No. Should it be discussed? Absolutely yes.
No, it shouldn't be, in the context of studying science.
Creationism has no more validity than any other creation myth. It should be dismissed from science as readily as Zeus, Ra, or Xenu.
The appropriate place to study mythology is in a mythology class - until and unless that mythology offers falsifiable evidence to support moving it into the sphere of reality.
I think if you were to write a report on such a topic you would have to honestly examine their arguments and to what extent they have any credible basis.
Otherwise, to write a report about a subject where supposedly there is already an overwhelming agreement seems a waste of time. Who would you be trying to convince?
The author isn't saying that "these people are absolutely, without any doubt, sick and being paranoid". What he actually said is: "A large number appear to have delusional disorder or schizophrenia, psychiatrists say."
At a glance, yes, the author did cover both sides of the story. But if you do read carefully, you would notice the wording and tone clearly suggest the author's opinion and pre-assumption. The whole article resembles an interview of a group of patients and their doctors.
Some quotes that reveals the author's view:
"For the few specialists who have looked closely, these individuals represent an alarming development in the history of mental illness: thousands of sick people, banded together and demanding recognition on the basis of shared paranoias."
"The vast majority of people with psychosis never resort to violence. Still, studies suggest that a small number of those experiencing psychotic episodes — especially paranoid thoughts, accompanied by voices making commands — are more likely to act on hostile urges than people without a mental illness."
"The big hope is that society will wake up to what’s happening and put a stop to it, those who feel targeted say. In some cases, they do seek psychiatric help. In others, the delusions subside. For the rest, the prognosis isn’t good, psychiatrists say. Many contemplate suicide."
"One thing he is certain of though, he says: He’s not crazy."
These communities seem natural given the nature of the internet. The barrier to publishing or forming a community is pretty much non-existent, and because the internet transcends most borders the critical mass of people required to form communities with non-mainstream ideals is incredibly low. And so you get groups of holocaust deniers, flat earthers and apparently (+ unfortunately) paranoid schizophrenics.
It seems like the internet might almost reinforce the echo chamber by amplifying the feeling that everyone else is a 'sheep', because you see the big communities of people (news organizations, social media etc) dismissing your communities ideas and so people turn more inward and focus more on others who hold the same views.
Exactly. The "gang-stalking victim" group is just more obviously detached from reality. But all of us, including me, are in one or more of these now. We just don't know which ones.
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.
It sounds like the Catharsis Hypothesis, which states that the release of aggression in small ways prevents large expressions of aggression. This has been rather thoroughly discredited. Small displays of aggression (e.g. ranting online) train an individual that aggression is an appropriate response, and leads to larger displays of aggression (e.g. physical attacks).
I provide an alternative hypothesis - most people are basically lazy. I don't mean that in a very negative sense, but that our brains are wired to take the path of lesser resistance whenever possible. I forget where I read this first, but I have seen it corroborated by academia. It is INFINITELY easier to type out a hateful message and be agreed with by your peers, than to do something violent and risk real repercussions.
That has nothing to do with laziness though, and everything with risk perception.
Still, if micro-aggressions aren't checked, it is easy to assume they are accepted. That will lead to an escalation of aggression like the GP described.
First, I want to say that I believe people when they say they are seeing things. Most humans appear to have a mechanism by which they can visualize objects as if they are real. This phenomenon of visualization has been largely unexplored. It would appear people visualize in widely different ways.
These people are apparently tormented by bad visualization system security. I've hypothesized about visualization systems going bad before when I looked at working at Magic Leap. If we all end up wearing AR headsets, how is it that I can guarantee what I'm seeing is an accurate representation of what I want to see? Don't let anyone tell you we a solution for trusted security for this stuff! We fucking don't. Yet.
How is it that human's visual systems are secured against penetration? How is it that some appear to be vulnerable, while others, such as myself, appear to be completely "locked down" in their visualization systems?
I'm beginning to suspect that this so called affliction "Aphantasia" is actually a strong feature that is related to insanity. I'm thankful to the fact I don't have the ability to visualize. I also may be crazy and don't realize it.
> The similarities of the cases spoke to a wide-ranging campaign, he said. “If the psychiatrists want to say that this is schizophrenia or delusional disorder, that’s fine,” he said. “But every one of these victims have the same story.”
Just because there's thousands of folks suffering identical symptoms doesn't mean it's not psychosis. But it would be interesting if somehow there were an environmental component to the problem. Likely not a pernicious, perpetrated-by-ne'er do wells one, but it could be that something most people interact with daily and thought to be harmless has a harmful effect in some small number of people.
In fact, there is an "environmental component" to the problem, mentioned right there in the article: the self-organized groups on the internet which amplify and reinforce the persecutory delusions these people are experiencing.
People have been developing schizo persecution complexes for as long as I remember. Just the contents of the delusions differ depending on the victim’s experiences.
I wonder if modern society exacerbates or amplifies it, though by “modern” I mean post-Agricultural Revolution. We humans tend to think that we can handle any problem that we create for ourselves, but I think there is some strain, and everybody has a breaking point. We don’t all break the same way. See also: Education practices.
It certainly doesn’t help that the government really is trying to spy on you, the government really is pushing people to do crazy things ([0] and others), and the people in government offices really are lying to you ([1], [2], for why the President is wrong about Snowden having official channels). The article mentions MKUltra[3], which obsesses one of the relatively harmless schizos whom I know. Some things are clearly false, or false but difficult to falsify (mind control satellites, anyone?), but I feel that this nuance is usually lacking in persecution complexes.
>Just because there's thousands of folks suffering identical symptoms doesn't mean it's not psychosis.
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.
I'm a psychiatrist and I primarily work with patients who are involved in the legal system.
A sadly common scenario that I see is paranoia resulting in the patient acting in what they believe to be self-defense, with injury or death to another person.
Once medicated, and able to process the world without their paranoia, these people are almost always devastated about their actions.
this is incredibly sad. could loneliness be a contributing factor?
This reminds of This American Life episode about a man who got off his medication and felt like there were trained assassins after him. He ended up causing a lot of damage, attacking cops, and being shot in the process (not deadly). Luckily we do have medication that can help with such conditions.
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.
An interesting observation. Obvious, on the face of it, but then you consider: what if they'd been shot in the little finger. Very unlikely to cause death (where prompt medical help is available). People have died from biting their nails (at least, from complications caused from subsequent infection when the skin was broken) but you'd hardly call nail biting a "deadly habit". They both lay along a scale of deadliness. I wonder how probable an action has to be of causing death before it can safely be called deadly?
Huh? I think you may be confused. Being shot mean being struck by a bullet. Inanimate objects can be shot. Whether it's deadly/fatal is a consequence of the injury.
I see what you mean, but when people use "deadly" in retrospect, it's typically synonymous with "fatal". It would be one thing if there were potential for confusion, but here, there's really not.
Always appreciate feedback considering English is not my first language, but considering the past tense wouldn't it be ok to say the shot was not deadly? That is not to say the intent wasn't
Ah, the old practice of using a word that comes from French to give some nuance when a Germanic word once worked. The Miriam-Webster dictionary says SonicSoul’s usage was correct, meaning “in a manner to cause death,” but now is archaic.
It's not paranoia if they're really after you. Read my blog at http://surroundedbyspies1.tumblr.com. I have written about 1) Cops trying to get me to talk about Muslims in a bar, after posting a lot of anti Muslim stuff online about ground zero mosque. 2) Finding a user avatar of Osama Bin Laden on the profile of a contractor I paid, reporting it to the FBI, and being involuntarily committed few weeks later for 20 days. 3) Being recruited by the UN and then finding proof via Rapportive gmail tool that they were spying on me via someone I fell in love with on Twitter. I wrote Rapportive asking about the proof and Rapportive stopped using Rapleaf, their data provider, that day. The service Rapportive is named for. We are not all delusional.
A few months ago, I was in hospital for a major surgery. It went OK, I saw family but was going to be in for a few days to deal with recovery. Heavy painkillers.
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.
If they only knew the real, actual surveillance they're under every second of their lives - every call, every packet online, every entrance into public space, every single move from one location to another...
It's scary that we call these people are "paranoid" for thinking people are watching them - mentally ill, even - when the reality may be (edit: is) far scarier than the fantasy.
The difference is that while the cost of performing electronic surveillance approximates zero for each individual in a society as a whole, these people believe that the government will pay X agents $N salary to spend time to target them specifically.
Individual surveillance of course happens - but it probably isn't happening to most of these people. It isn't reasonable.
And regardless the yardstick by which we measure the paranoia of people, and especially paranoid schizophrenics, is whether they are prompted to perform harmful actions.
"Sometimes they bumped into him and whispered nonsense into his ear, he said." is a different ball park than believing that the government is watching everything you say.
> Mental health professionals say the narrative has taken hold among a group of people experiencing psychotic symptoms that have troubled the human mind since time immemorial. Except now victims are connecting on the internet, organizing and defying medical explanations for what’s happening to them.
I think that paragraph has implications far beyond just the paranoia described...
> Rokeach added a comment in the final revision of the book that, while the experiment did not cure any of the three Christs, "It did cure me of my godlike delusion that I could manipulate them out of their beliefs."
LOL alright, well, it seems the people in the article/video are asking for help. They similarly would be unreasonable to demand that someone give them help in a specific way. Beggers can't be choosers.
Kidding aside, while I know the article is talking about gang-stalking and paranoia of things that aren't there as variations of psychosis, there is a deeper conversation to be had about the role of real government and private business in actions and methods that actually encourage them, along with the fact that sometimes people aren't just crazy and things really are happening to them.
So as not to get to distracted from the original topic, I won't expound too much, but in an era of mk ultra, emf weaponry, massive surveillance societies, silencing of dissidents, including assassination, and various other trust breaking experiments or operations against our own citizens, perhaps they arent all crazy.
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.
The saddest part about this is probably how alienating it must feel. Any of your friends that try and convince you that you have a problem are simply part of the problem working against you.
I bet that at least plays a small role in the documented unwillingness to seek out professional help.
The article goes right into lumping up all the people who doubted official story on 9/11 with paranoids. Nice.
Reminds me of the way psychiatry was used in Soviet Union to put people who objected the official party line into mandatory detention in the hospital.[1]
Good instincts. The word 'Morgellon' in turn reminds me of Scientology. I hate to betray a bias here, but I wonder what percentage of that group are or were fairly religious? I know someone like this, and they were heavily involved with their church (Christian).
There could be an overlap. While I don't know if this has been researched, my experience in Evangelic and Pentecostal churches is that it has a really high number of people who have mental disorders.
That's not a cheeky militant atheist comment, by the way. I'm not counting the average church member who believes things that to most (or at least many) of us is crazy.
Honestly, it was really nice to see. Many of these people suffered greatly outside of and before their church life, but as part of a community that itself was considered 'acceptably crazy' by much of society, and a community that strongly emphasizes care for each other, they often thrived and, interestingly, their symptoms often decreased.
For example, prophecy was a relatively common element of church life. There were special services where there was 'more room for the holy spirit', and people could share what I would call 'intuitions', which could range from a premonitory dream they had to a full-blown vision. This was catnip for people with 'known' mental issues, but the mere fact that their visions were given room and a measure of respect seemed to actually help them 'get better'.
What was fascinating about all this to me was that there was, in fact, a huge difference between the average church goer and the 'mentally ill' person sharing a prophecy, even if on a rational level I consider both prophecies to be fundamentally delusional (and I don't mean that in a derogatory way).
I've long been meaning to dive into this again, or look into research on the matter, because it's just so incredibly weird to experience a bunch of people acting, by some measures, insane and yet noticing a marked difference between those who are 'otherwise normal' and those who are not, even as a nonbeliever.
I think we humans just have varying levels of need for the irrational, and it's best for everyone that the irrational be safely available - which includes a certain degree of social acceptability. "Acceptable crazy," as you say.
Note the increase in Icelandic belief in elves as their society's attachment to Christianity wanes...
My personal favorite flavor of irrationality: liberal Christianity - the Episcopal Church, to be precise. Just enough of the mysterious and traditional ritual, paired with acceptance of the reality we must share with everyone. We voted to offer same-sex marriages church-wide a few days after the US Supreme Court required it nationwide, and have long believed that science is best left to the scientists. But it's probably not enough irrationality to satisfy most people, as every time we shed a little of the irrational, we shed members.
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]
WRT my comment below, not the poster you seemed to have replied to, I am not at all upset about investigating a disease, mental or physical, however, I believe the initial impetus was to lobby to look into it as a physical disease (worms, tiny bugs, whatever), and that was where my astonishment came from; 6 years of finding no chemical, or organism, or other physical disease-causing entity. Maybe I misread the link, but that's how I took it. I am sorry you took it the wrong way.
Wow, a 6-year study for something that had no real physical proof (marks made before diagnosis don't count) or cause other than delusion. I want a tax refund.
I think people have misunderstood my post. It was not against funding for any mental illness, or mental disease studies. The comment was in direct response to a linked article in the NY Times article, about Morgellons.
I have had friends and family with mental health issues, so believe me, I am not a doubter about the seriousness of mental health and the associated diseases.
Morgellons:
"a self-diagnosed skin condition that is actually a form of delusional disorder in which individuals believe they are infested with inanimate material like sand, hairs, thread, or fibers, while in reality no such infestation is present." [1].
I was astonished it took a 2 years to conduct the investigation, and another 4 years to publish, to finally in the end rule out actual physical causes, and arrive at the DI (Delusional Infestation) diagnosis. Remember, DI has been in the literature since 1937; they didn't discover it.
There is one sense in which they are almost certainly correct in their claims of being victimised by a group: Trolling.
The article says that Targeted Individuals support each other online. I cannot imagine trolls do not represent a good number of such a support community.
Having run into people like this and the fact there really are people that are the subjects of targeted psychology operations, it's a very troubling and complex topic.
Guess I'd be curious if there's a way to prove to someone they're not being targeted.
I took a look at the YouTube video from StalkinVictim (linked to from the article), and it's instructive. He is wearing a GoPro in public, poking out of his chest (he claims it's hard to notice, but who knows), and he gets some looks from people, which is what I would expect. He sees signs of surveillance in women with crossed arms, in someone standing next to him at both the station and the train, and in everyone who glances in his general direction. More tellingly, he readily admits he can't think of a single reason why he's being targeted.
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.
No doubt targeted operations exist, but unless you have good reason to believe you should be targeted (such as you having left the church of Scientology or a similar organization) then you aren't targeted.
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.
I don't actually find it that implausible that the same sort of organizations that engage in experimental torture campaigns also engage in at least some experimental gaslighting campaigns.
To be fair, some people (to a lesser extent) were targeted at random when Facebook was showing some people more negative posts on their newsfeeds as an experiment.
Fact that it's random means it's not the same; explicitly talking about targeted efforts. Also, online efforts are not as resource intensive as in the real world.
Only way this might be similar is if for training or testing reasons that someone randomly became the subject of some effort. Given the resources this would take, such efforts would be short in duration and likely near known R&D or training spots for entities that would engage in things like that.
That is both something that has a reason (they want to test something, in order to change/improve their product) and it doesn't require massive resources since it's automated. Believing this isn't necessarily crazy.
This article touches on a host issues very similar to those associated with "The Truman Show delusion." There's a good New Yorker article (http://bit.ly/1ULiZr6) from 2013 about these delusions and their relation to media and social media.
The problem with these articles is they mix delusional paranoia, which is a real thing, with investigation into government corruption, which is also a real thing. The article muddies the waters between the two in a politicized way and thus helps to legitimize ad hominem attacks.
These people found an ally in California's anti-mind control candidate for U.S. Senate:
"... the freedom to think one's own thoughts free from interferance such as that from Voice to Skull (V2K) mind control technology ... legislation to ban non-consensual human experimentation and mind control slavery by means of satellite weapons systems and and GWEN Tower platforms ..."
It's when someone takes remote control of your computer and then uses it to harass you (among other things)... e.g. by suddenly opening your DVD tray, etc.
I wonder if some of them are victims of "ratting."
Why not make sleeping meds and other meds that treat mental illeness over the counter drugs ? There is simply too much friction to get proper medicines in USA. A walk into drug store lowers human dignity as one is treated like a criminal by default.
Sleeping meds - the Z drugs (like Zopiclone) - have some potential for addiction. (One of the top ten drugs obtained using stolen prescription pads in France; increased numbers of people attending drug rehab services in Ireland).
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.
The problem is that medication isn't a cure-all, and can actually significantly worsen a situation. It would be like selling 'radiation devices' people can use to treat their own cancer.
Of course, if we have medication that has been proven to work without side-effects, I'd be all in favor.
I know people who had psychological issues. The doctor gave them a simple prescription for "Restyl"[1]. The person has then simply buys the medicines by walking into a drug store with the same old prescription for the rest of his life.
One doctor's visit that is all.
In USA the guys will have to make several doctors visit, renew the prescription every month. Not to mention the insane amount of friction to get that doctor's appointment.
I do get the point you guys are making but letting the drug companies actively advertise their medicines will help in informing customers what drugs they may buy.
[1] Restyl, also known by the brand names of Niravam, Xanor, and Xanax, is a benzodiazepine-class, short-acting medication used to manage moderate to severe panic attacks and anxiety disorders. It is also used as an auxiliary treatment for anxiety caused by moderate depression. It's available in both generic form and extended release form (Xanax XR). In America, this medication is a schedule IV controlled substance under the Controlled Substances Act.
This is a horrible idea. These are powerful medicines with potentially very serious side effects. Their use (especially dosing) needs to be regulated by a trained medical professional. Medicine should also be balanced with non-medicine treatment.
There is OTC sleep meds, benadryl is the main one.
I think it is just being reported more, organizing with support groups forming due to the internet and other new technologies.
I can't help but recall the opening to the 1997 movie 'Conspiracy Theory' with Mel Gibson. This is pre-9/11, so there must have been enough whiff of the zeitgeist to make it then into a mainstream movie. That sort of lends evidence to my position that this is common to heavily populated urban areas where the disenfranchised can go unnoticed, and it is not a new phenomenon or necessarily growing more; it's just more visible.
I worked in the B. Dalton bookstore on 8th Street in the Village in NYC back in the 80s. One of the clerks was really into conspiracy theories and other fringe occult and alternate lifestyle stuff. He would throw me a book either self-published, or from an obscure publisher about many things like the U.S. government using Orgone energy guns to control the public and weather [1]. These texts were always similar to real academic publications - footnotes, bibliographies, photos, graphs - they were very fun to read!
He also turned me on to the book 'The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail' published 21 years before Dan Brown's 'The Da Vinci Code', and before learning of the plagiarism lawsuit, it seemed like a fictionalized account of the book. Of course Dan Brown created a story outside of just the conspiracy theory premise [2].
Another was 'Spear of Destiny' published 1973 about the history and occult powers of the storied spear used to pierce Jesus Christ's side [3]
I also used to go with my bookstore buddy to visit some squatters living in the East Village. I'd listen to all of the theories about mind control, tainted water, secret cable TV brainwashing messages, and on and on. Great fun, really, but there were some truly neurotic people in the bunch. But then again, also some real rational people just living an alternate lifestyle. I can relate to being the participant-observer in my life's adventures. I guess its part of ethnography formally.
But then again, this was the time of the conspiracy-driven, weird film 'Videodrome' by David Cronenberg. I really need to get hold of a copy, and still see how it compares to how much I enjoyed it back then [4]. Just to see the video cassette inserted into James Woods' stomach!
The original Deux Ex (2000) used that same zeitgeist to brilliant effect.
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.
This looks like a preparation for society to dismiss anyone who will be actually targeted as insane. Technique widely used during Soviet regime times. Asylums were for nonconforming opinions. This looks ripe for abuse for just that.
what differentiates these people from those who say they were born with the wrong genitalia? In both cases there is evidence to the contrary of the person's claims (no one is watching the paranoid person, a person's genitals exist as they exist). Why do we accept a transgendered person as being reasonable but a paranoid person as not?
A genetic male with gender dysphoria would agree with the objective fact that they have a penis. Their subjective experience would say "I should have a vagina instead".
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.
Their definition of "woman" doesn't have the requirement of a vagina, though. In their minds, gender is a subjective mental state. Ask if they have a penis. When it comes down to concrete realities, I doubt that most of them would say "no".
If someone abducted me and forced a sex-change operation on me, then I'd have to say that I had a vagina, but I'd still say that I was a man. I'd consider the physical state of my body a result of an act of mutilation.
Them saying "I am a woman", or me saying "I am a man", is a statement of gender (a social construct) rather than sex (a biological fact).
Traditionally, we'd consider sex and gender to be in lockstep, and it wouldn't be useful to consider them as anything but perfect synonyms. "I'm male" is a simple enough concept. It means three things: that I have a penis, consider myself male, and I'm attracted to females.
Add in the 5%-ish of the population where the 3rd point is completely false, and the larger percent where it's true, but not completely exclusive.
Add in the smaller segment of the population where the second point doesn't match the first.
Add in the yet smaller segment where even the first point doesn't have a binary truth value.
This isn't to say that there aren't delusional people that would argue about the observable biological state, just that mostly I'd think they're talking about their perception of their own gender, rather than their perception of their sex.
There are several reasons this comparison breaks down, but here's one:
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.
At the risk of derailing this conversation, do you have resources to show that transitioning works? The debate on both sides has muddied the water for me and I'd love to see evidence for this. Thanks in advance.
I know this is largely anecdotal and not very scientific, but just listen to [what trans people have to say about it][]. There are some people who do regret transitioning, but usually the reason they give is the discrimination they experience because of transitioning, not any genuine dissatisfaction with themselves.
There is [a small propaganda war being waged by transphobic conservatives][] to create the illusion of a large percentage of trans people that regret their transition, but just look at their references. You'll find every link is either to the Daily Mail or some other hate group referencing even more hate groups in a big web of circular reasoning.
Generally, there's not a lot of hard data to work with on issues relating to the trans community right now, which is a little frustrating, but hopefully there will be more soon as the scientific community is finally starting to recognize the LGBT community and conduct real science on this stuff.
I think that approach is a little too simplistic. A lot of people have aspects to their minds that they would change in a heart beat if there was some way to do so. I say we let the person decide which way they want to go.
> 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.
Why are you more keen to edit the brain than the body? If I can switch around your body parts to make you feel more comfortable, that seems less invasive than surgery or drugs which make you think different thoughts - especially when those thoughts are a core part of your personality (your sexual identity) and are only pathological within the context of the body you were born with.
Both should be options. It's hard for me to say a priori which one I would choose given that I don't actually know what gender dysphoria feels like, and it definitely seems like something you'd have to experience to truly understand. One major advantage of changing the mind over the body is that a lot of people want their own children (independent of gender), and transitioning removes that possibility modulo some work-arounds.
But just because someone has a specific mind now doesn't mean that they'd want to change it. There are lots of people who want to change their minds. I suspect that most people with depression and other mental disorders would love to have the option to get a treatment that changed their mind to remove that condition. I bet most of us here would change our minds in order to be smarter, and indeed some people are already taking drugs that claim to be able to do so (though the entire field is in its infancy). More to the point, at least one transgender person I know says she wishes she could've simply changed her mind to agree with her body rather than go through the entire process of changing her body. Our minds are maybe more malleable than you think.
I'm a trans woman, and I can talk about this a little bit, but for more, I'd highly recommend you read [Whipping Girl by Julia Serano][]. Serano is a trans woman and biologist that has studied and written about transsexuality extensively.
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.
I was going to say that here. That could be reason for jailtime as far as i'm concerned; I have two friends with serious mental illnesses (developed around 18 using recreational drugs); if you would 'prank' them you would endanger them and people around them. It's a nasty thing.
And some people don't just care. Look at some of the "pranks"(aka "social experiments") on youtube these days. Makes you wonder what type of things are going through the minds of these so called pranksters.
Its a real phenomena; I'm a programmer and run r/gangstalkingmkultra.
Humans did not evolve defenses against biohacking, We did not evolve: scales, snake eyes, ear drums seperate-enough from the skull. We consider these features ugly, not necessary...
The animal mind is a sensor [of light, color, heat, sound, vibration, emf], and is extremely sensitive to these. There are 90+ patents for mind control, everything from Radio, EMF, Infrared, Pulse positioned sine waves, and ultrasound.
Science wont talk about most of this stuff, for example a scientist told me radio could not affect the humans nervous system since we are 96% water; they now claim we are 60% water, but forgot they said radio was not the cause.
Scientists are purposely discrediting these people, and are wrong about/lying about/not studying so many topics i have compiled a partial list [ reddit.com/r/gangstalkingmkultra/comments/4fb98a/science_lies_relevant_to_mind_control/ ]
Its rather bad because psychiatry was a complete fraud. The "treatments" for one mental illness were [ reddit.com/r/gangstalkingmkultra/comments/4a4y1d/psychiatry_is_a_medical_fraud/ ]
hand crank drill to the skull and drain blood
dr freemans icepick lobotomy
dr freemans shock until KO
more bizzaro surgeries
straight jackets 24/7
tying the person to a bed 20 hours a day
drugging them and locking them up
lithium a toxin so poisonous its used for chemotherapy to kill unkillable mutant cancer cells
sterilization and eugenics
and current treatments are worth 10,000,000,000 a month, but I dont think they cured anyone [their previous treatments were stopped because they did not work and were barbaric].
Anyways its a real phenomena, web and youtube have videos and articles, ex-CIA, ex-FBI, ex-Army, ex-NSA, have testified that a global mind control system exists. google agency name + DEW, mk ultra, or mind control. Theres something like 30-40+ serial killers/spree shooters that said mind control exists before they went on their spree.
I just want to point out the lack of paywall on this article. Either it's not a big money-maker, or they're going to make up for the paywall profits with the volume of other ads they're showing today.
> An internet search for “gang-stalking,” however, turns up page after page of results that regard it as fact. “What’s scary for me is that there are no counter sites that try and convince targeted individuals that they are delusional,” Dr. Sheridan said. “They end up in a closed ideology echo chamber,” she said.
What could reinforce this viewpoint any more than one of the most powerful entities on the planet modifying their results to convince them it's all in their heads?
When it's just tens or hundreds of thousands of people that believe in something ridiculous, we call it delusions but when that number gets into the millions we call it truth. Popularity is indeed the harbinger of truth. In other words, how is this different than the idiots who are convinced terrorists are after them? Just because we haven't yet identified the mental sickness in the latter group doesn't mean their conspiracy theories are true rather than delusions, but we are fine with even going to war to protect them. I see no difference between delusional psychotic patients, in other words, and many run of the mill idiots.
Immediately the article associates 9/11 truthers with mental illness. That is the main point of the article -- to remind everyone that if you believe your government did something truly heinous, you must be crazy.
There is a long history of governments using accusations of mental illness when they get caught.
Maybe you are all just living in a false reality created by constant propaganda on television and a type of collective denial.
Or - is it possible that they weren't talking generally (that is - if you believe a government can do anything wrong, you're crazy), and they were talking specifically(if you think the US government did 9/11 - you're crazy)?
Just because governments can do bad things isn't proof that a particular bad thing happened from the government.
Regardless of your opinion with regard to the responsibility for the 9/11 attacks and the methods by which they were carried out, society itself was already transforming at that point to be more internet -connected and -dependent, as well as having heightened security and nationwide paranoia about further terrorist attacks and nebulous threats. This would seem to be relevant. The article also did not mention the nature of their attribution for the attacks as a binding factor of the paranoid.
Please remember that these kinds of communities have sprung up in the context of the ongoing stigma of mental illness, and the limitations of present medications for psychosis (most have unpleasant side-effects). Other contributors are a mistrust of authority, and the always-complicated balance between individual liberties and involuntary treatment.
Finally, a plea for some compassion. Many of these people live a deeply tormented life, and feel like they can't trust anyone. It's a hard existence for both them and their families. It might seem like a humorous phenomenon, but there's a lot of suffering here.