After
35 years, I retired my license to diagnose and treat individuals and
families for behavioral health issues. But as a retired clinical
psychologist tracking news and social media, I believe that, since the
2020 election, our federal government is now officially insane. It
suffers from what one might call Mass Paranoid Disorder of Psychotic
Proportions. This is not an official psychiatric disorder, but if it
were, primary symptoms would be similar to those of individual paranoid
disorders, but on a massive collective group level, and include:
a) pervasive suspiciousness and distrust of others' motives,
b) delusions of grandiosity and, because of their "specialness," delusions of persecution,
c) misinterpretation of innocuous behavior as major insults or attacks,
d) rigid inability to forgive with a tendency to hold grudges,
e) heightened vigilance and scanning for real or imagined threats, and
f)
use of projection as the primary defense mechanism (e.g., "We're not
the angry, dangerous ones with hate and hostile intent; that's all of
you who are out to get us.”).
What else can explain:
a) the recent establishment of security fences, razor wire and tens of thousands of troops surrounding our Capitol,
b)
the obsession with boogeymen like alleged white supremacists, so-called
right wing “domestic terrorists,” the shadowy “QAnon” entity, everyday
Trump supporters and even Trump himself,
c)
the need to keep middle class Americans locked down, isolated,
separated and silenced to “cancel” and neutralize the threat they
imagine that we represent, or
d)
the astounding level of arrogance and unjustified moral superiority
evident in the message that the government knows better and is
therefore, in true communist form, entitled to override our
constitutional rights?
Clearly,
this is mob psychology run amok and unwittingly supported by otherwise
good people who are being manipulated like subjects in the Milgram
experiments of the 1960s.
While
it might be tempting to write all of this off as a passing political
phenomenon that will end with upcoming elections or as nothing to really
worry about, we may want to reconsider and take it very seriously as an
existential threat to our and our nation’s future. Although it’s a
mistaken myth that people with psychiatric disorders are dangerous to
others, the main exception to that rule is with people who exhibit
paranoid symptom patterns. The reason is that paranoid thinking
sometimes provokes people to attack their perceived “enemies” before
they themselves are attacked. There’s no reason to think that the same
preemptive strategy isn’t already brewing with the paranoid culture that
has consumed much of Washington D.C. and is being fed to the masses via
our educational system and mainstream media.
For
Americans who find themselves confused and doubting their own judgement
because they can’t understand the recent increasingly radical and
irrational actions of our federal government, it’s important to reframe
the problem as resting mainly within the out-of-touch-with-reality
culture of the ruling elite, not that of the majority of Americans. In
other words, it’s not us, it’s them! The sad irony is that, once we’re
tagged by those in power as the “enemy”, we’re placed in a position
where we need to be prepared to defend ourselves from what is a real,
not an imagined, threat.
