If you have long thought that the country was in the grip of mass psychosis, you are not alone.
Patty Mulcahy recounts her descent into paranoid psychosis for Salon. The Boston-based filmmaker began to believe Fox News hosts on her father’s television were speaking directly to her, and that the Russia investigation was a global, mind-control conspiracy:
I was a forty-six-year-old filmmaker when I suddenly began to have paranoid thoughts that people were following me. When I lost my day job due to bizarre behavior, I lost my excellent health insurance. I was dumped into America’s broken mental health care system that offers substandard psychiatric care to patients on Medicaid, while spending vast amounts of taxpayer money. Misdiagnosed and neglected at the county hospital, I got sicker and sicker … until the TV started talking to me.
She is just grateful she did not end up homeless or in prison.
People with paranoid schizophrenia see patterns that don’t actually exist. Just like conspiracy theorists, they are constantly scanning the news for pieces of information to connect the dots about unseen forces controlling events. Both groups believe they are being persecuted by others. I had grandiose beliefs that I was at the center of every news story on TV. My mind was looking to cast a villain to account for the symptoms of a brain disease. The media handed me a culprit to blame.
If not several. Just over one percent of the U.S. population aged 18 and older are affected by schizophrenia. An estimated 40 percent of individuals with the condition are untreated in any given year.
“Greater than all physical dangers are the tremendous effects of delusional ideas …”
In light of the mass delusions held by large segments of the population, Nicole Karlis offered two weeks ago that Carl Jung saw delusional ideas as a societal threat, and particularly in the United States. “Greater than all physical dangers are the tremendous effects of delusional ideas, which are yet denied all reality by our world-blinded consciousness,” Jung wrote. “Our much vaunted reason and our boundlessly overestimated will are sometimes utterly powerless in the face of ‘unreal’ thoughts.”
Karlis writes:
Some psychologists believe that this is what the country is experiencing right now — more or less.
“Something’s definitely happening, and I think COVID amplified it to a painful point, you could say,” Katharine Bainbridge, a Jungian analyst, tells Salon.
[…]
“Jung said man cannot live without religion — so you make it up,” Bainbridge said. “You can’t not have a central myth to live by. He would say maybe in this time that we’ve lost that — we don’t have a collective unifying principle.”
Cultural theorists often describe the history of human civilization as one of a transition between different central guiding myths. In the Western world, Christianity undergirded everyday existence and society for over a thousand years. After the Renaissance, the central guiding myth became a belief in rationalism; then, in modernity, a belief that technology might improve the lot of all humans.
That’s all falling apart now.
“Carl Jung noted that ‘the wolf inside’ man was far more a threat to human existence than external forces,” Dr. Carla Marie Manly, a clinical psychologist and author of “Joy From Fear,” told Salon. “When mental forces become so toxic as to harm our overall well-being on an individual and collective level a ‘psychic epidemic’ can result.”
So, too, with a viral one.
Thirty years go, about the time I was assembling a mock New Age trade journal, I speculated that if there is, as Jung believed, a collective unconscious, it is perhaps not as quick to adapt as our technologies. I wrote, “Stripped of our myths by science, people have scrambled frantically to reconstruct the interior landscape from a pastiche of mystical icons – from pyramids to crop circles to UFOs – and a faith in beneficent higher beings that reassures us that someone is in control, even if that someone is not us.” Simply put, we are trying to cope with a collective unconscious that lags external reality by a few centuries by recreating new myths.
Things could get worse before they get better, too:
Space agencies like NASA and ESA have long been searching for extraterrestrial life in other distant nooks of the universe. However, until now, neither of these space agencies have succeeded in finding strong evidence of alien life. And now, NASA is apparently hiring priests to make human beings prepare for a possible alien first contact in the future.
According to reports, NASA is apparently hiring 24 theologians as part of a plan to work out how different religions will react when humans make their first contact with aliens. British clergyman Reverend Dr Andrew Davison who works at the University of Cambridge is one among those experts who will be a part of this team.
Could we get even more psychotic? Yes. Or maybe we will just not look up.
It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here: