> terror of global catastrophe That's considered a delusion?
If you are so terrified that it interferes with your normal everyday personal functioning, then yes.
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Delusional themes may be more varied than we thought
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Re: Delusional themes may be more varied than we thought
#22Has anyone looked at similar studies from, say, five years ago? I worry that half of what was labeled “delusional” back then is now a widely accepted opinion. Feels like we're one step away from a follow-up paper titled "We regret to inform you: The paranoid were just early." Not saying everything turns out to be true - just that social consensus tends to shift a lot faster than clinical definitions.
The clinical definition of delusion includes social consensus. From DSM-5:
"Delusions are deemed bizarre if they are clearly implausible and not understandable to same-culture peers and do not derive from ordinary life experiences. […] The distinction between a delusion and a strongly held idea is sometimes difficult to make and depends in part on the degree of conviction with which the belief is held despite clear or reasonable contradictory evidence regarding its veracity."
Re: Delusional themes may be more varied than we thought
#23The "terror of global catastrophe" is what doomscroller media constantly hammers onto its readers. And once someone has "bought in", it's impossible to reason with them. They'll just forever spread anxiety around them.
What's interesting is how it happens. Take someone who is mentally stable and subject them to a terminally online lifestyle for a year or two. They will have tons of anxiety about all sorts of things, not the least of which will be that the world is doomed (with no hope), that our societies and way of life are in the "late stage" and moments from collapse, and so on.
And it's a bit of a tragedy. If we took only the energy that people spend evangelizing those doom beliefs and put that energy into productive efforts, that alone could probably prevent whatever disaster is being evangelized. But maybe that'd not be good for engagement on social media or something.
Re: Delusional themes may be more varied than we thought
#24direct link to paper (the numbers are on page 5) https://watermark.silverchair.com/sbae225.pdf?token=AQECAHi2...
Worse than the DOI link at the end of the article, which points directly to the OA paper available at the publishers page.
Re: Delusional themes may be more varied than we thought
#25If no one told me about this being about schizophrenia, I would interpret Figure 3 as a categorization of american movies and series.
Or maybe the internet. People love to dramatize these things.
Re: Delusional themes may be more varied than we thought
#26> terror of global catastrophe That's considered a delusion?
If you are so terrified that it interferes with your normal everyday personal functioning, then yes.
It might be a wrong belief or harmful belief or unhealthy belief but it's not a psychotic belief. I should know, I'm just a little psychotic. I'm not quite sure if my belief that I can transform into a fox is psychotic or not.
Re: Delusional themes may be more varied than we thought
#27The "terror of global catastrophe" is what doomscroller media constantly hammers onto its readers. And once someone has "bought in", it's impossible to reason with them. They'll just forever spread anxiety around them. What's interesting is how it happens. Take someone who is mentally stable and subject them to a terminally online lifestyle for a year or two. They will have tons of anxiety about all sorts of things,…
Fed
Re: Delusional themes may be more varied than we thought
#28This is the list they compiled, with a little hash if it was in the DSM-V before this study:
• Persecutory/paranoid #
• Reference #
• Family/relatives
• Grandiose #
• Passivity
• Schneiderian
• Neighbours/friends/associates
• Spied on/watched
• Paranormal
• Sexual
• Poisoning
• Religious
• Control #
• Mindreading
• Special powers/skills
• Infidelty
• Bizarre #
• Perception
• Thought broadcast #
• Somatic #
• Police/secret agent/army
• Religious leader/God/Prophet/Saint
• Thought insertion #
• Jealousy #
• Guilt/sin
• Made affect
• Hypochondriacal
• Fantastic delusional memories
• Thought withdrawal
• Erotomanic heterosexual #
• Possession
• Primary
• Catastrophe/world catastrophe
• Poverty
• Nihilistic/negation
• Spy/surveillance
• Made impulse
The authors’ primary goal appears to not have been to shed light on the diversity of delusional experience, but to indicate some evidence that it is culturally sensitive, so right after this chart, we get into the discussion section and it discusses how in East Asia you can find slightly more delusions of jealousy, in Eastern Europe you can find slightly more delusions of guilt/sin, in their dataset.
Reinterpreting it as this press release does, as a survey of the variety of delusional experience, makes for some interesting food for thought, but a lot of the categories identified kind of are just who are you being paranoid about, and what do you think they are doing. So you might have thought that people are afraid of strangers, this data set points to them being more delusional about family members, or thinking strangers are government spies, it's perhaps surprisingly not a stranger as a stranger that is terrifying? (Compare e.g. with the widespread worry among parents that a stranger might abduct their child.)
The passivity delusion (“I’m not in control of my body, someone else takes over”) and Schneiderian delusion (which I think is “someone is narrating my life in a Stanley Parable-esque way”?) seem like solid omissions on the DSM-V's part, but after that I feel like I am scrolling down to hypochondriacal and “Fantastic delusional memories” (which is presumably something like “I actually went to Narnia when I was a kid, it's a real place”?) before I see things that genuinely strike me as, I didn't realize some folks have those delusions in their schizophrenia or whatever.
Re: Delusional themes may be more varied than we thought
#29The "terror of global catastrophe" is what doomscroller media constantly hammers onto its readers. And once someone has "bought in", it's impossible to reason with them. They'll just forever spread anxiety around them. What's interesting is how it happens. Take someone who is mentally stable and subject them to a terminally online lifestyle for a year or two. They will have tons of anxiety about all sorts of things,…
Good insight, thanks. I've been struggling with existential dread related to https://ai-2027.com/ - trying to refute the arguments is exhausting, I should probably just ignore it and get on with my life.
Re: Delusional themes may be more varied than we thought
#30If no one told me about this being about schizophrenia, I would interpret Figure 3 as a categorization of american movies and series.
Or maybe the internet. People love to dramatize these things.
I took the most obvious cultural displacement industry as an example of the correlation between tropes, personas and delusions. Of course the internet is another one of those.
Whether is it the cause or not, it is impossible to say, at least in the way the paper studies it ("meta-analysis,", another way of saying "loose correlation").
People love it? I don't know. Maybe it's like an addiction instead of a real desire for it. Have you ever been in a culture without those elements to know what is like?
Anyway. Talking seriously now, schizophrenia is a big elephant in the world's room. Lots of correlations, no clear cause. The more you look into it, the more the cause seems to be inexistent.
Given its current symptoms-based definition, with very low effort, anyone could be classified as schizophrenic. Just one push to disrupt "normal everyday functioning behavior" and even the most sane person could end up in the schizo bucket.