From Becca Trabin: Everybody Simmer Down, Now

The Huffington Post reported last week that psychologists in London find paranoia to be much more commonplace than previously thought, and it’s continually on the rise.

According to British psychologist Daniel Freeman, nearly one in four Londoners regularly have paranoid thoughts. Freeman is a paranoia expert at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College and the author of a book on the subject.

Paranoia is defined as the exaggerated or unfounded fear that others are trying to hurt you. That includes thoughts that other people are trying to upset or annoy you, for example, by staring, laughing, or making unfriendly gestures.

Surveys of several thousands of people in Britain, the United States and elsewhere have found that rates of paranoia are slowly rising, although researchers’ estimates of how many of us have paranoid thoughts varies widely, from 5 percent to 50 percent.

The obvious question seems to be: Does anyone find this surprising? For the better part of eight years, the most powerful people in the world have been instigating psychotic associations in individuals through the use of paranoid, hysterical rhetoric. Feelings of mass helplessness, suspicion and uncertainty stemming from the ever-increasing pace of change have been deepened by perpetual messages and policies meant to reinforce those feelings.

It’s not enough to make mental health a public issue. Public issues need to be taken seriously in the public sphere as mental health issues. A doctor who treats an individual for paranoid delusions in the midst of rising rates of paranoia without giving consideration to the mood of the milieu does a disservice to his/her patient by forcing the patient to further internalize the society’s illness.

Likewise, a public discourse that ignores, denies or trivializes the existence of mental illness on the social level (i.e. pretending that certain policies are merely political and not signs of psychological disturbance, or calling them signs of disturbance but failing to take the next step in addressing the problem)—such a public discourse is doomed to slip away into its own unacknowledged madness.

As Stephen Colbert noted in his Word the day after the election, the real victory was the victory over fear. As we regain our strengths in our new climate of hope, perhaps we can also be more vigilant in observing the danger signs of unconscious psychotic impulses playing themselves out on a mass level so we can nip them in the democratic bud.

Liz | 11:02 AM | Uncategorized