'The story of a weird world I was warned never to tell'
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
When her eldest brother got his girlfriend pregnant, her mother learned from a vision that the girl was a witch, and had used mind control to force him into sex in an effort to infiltrate their christian stronghold. There were stories about how the youngest brother had once, foolishly, brought a piece of fantasy art (a picture of a dragon) home. And sure enough, in the middle of the night, the dragon came out of the picture and tried to slither into the boy's bed. His cries woke his parents, who investigated, and sure enough there was an evil aura coming from the picture. They burned it while praying, and then had a preacher come bless their house ASAP the next day. There were several other stories, equally silly but not as entertaining.
One difference is, it seems that Stan from this article worked mostly alone, but my girlfriend's family was part of a large church community who ate all this shit up and asked for seconds. When I visited their church, it seemed like everyone had their own stories to tell about personally witnessing supernatural assaults. The community all fed off of each other, and they got so excited at having a new person to share their stories with.
I guess that's why the DSM, when describing delusional disorder, specifies that "The belief is, at the least, unlikely, and out of keeping with the patient's social, cultural, and religious background." Don't want it to seem like they're starting a holy war.
The funny thing is, when I was telling my mother about the things I heard at my girlfriend's house, I literally described it as a "whole weird world".
One was convinced that the other had control of cosmic rays, and was bombarding him with them. Sadly, he was so out of touch with reality that even when he did have actual problems, nobody believed him.
These days, my father's showing many of the paranoias they had - mostly fueled by external sources, such as Trump's incoherent rantings and the utter bull from Infowars.
A note to anybody who takes exception to this: I don't care. I'm not interested in a political debate. I'm much more concerned about my father's ranting about gangsters ('banksters') behind the scenes orchestrating a move to a one world government, conspiracies to hide alien governmental contacts (including the recent bout of pneumonia that Buzz Aldrin contracted while visiting the aliens in Antarctica, the same ones he'd met when he landed on the Moon), the secret Muslim army that's building up in Australia to wrest control of the nation, and how someone showed on YouTube that he'd managed to build a perpetual motion machine that the evil "oil companies" had bought and were keeping secret so that they could deny free energy from the people of the planet. Also, global warming is a conspiracy by the evil socialist liberal neo-socialist left commie neo-commie elites who control the universities, the media, and weather forecasting groups and the only ones who can set us free from this conspiracy are the oil companies and Trump, who are the only good guys left.
Obviously they are experts and I am not. But I don't see how this can all be put down to just delusion.
>Pauline and her mother also received dozens of letters from people inside the weird world - from her father and godfather, for example, who were being held in a top secret prison there, Stan said. The handwriting always looked authentic, and the letters talked about things from their shared past.
How were these letters forged then? Was Stan in some sort of dissociative state when he forged them?
It seems much more reasonable to suppose that while Stan may have been delusional, Stan may have also been actively deceptive in an attempt to convince Ruth and her family to believe in his delusion. The kind hearted reading is that this was done in a misguided attempt to protect Ruth and her family. The less kind hearted reading was that this was used as a means of controlling Ruth and her family, especially given the extramarital feelings/affair between Stan and Ruth.
2. Ruth believes Stan's narrative and adds to it, working in her experiences.
3. Stan represses forging the narrative, dissociating and rationalizing what he's making up.
4. Both adults believe, and the delusion is bootstrapped.
One name for this phenomenon is Capgras Delusion:
A possibly delusional Minister misleads a wife and child into moving across Canada repeatedly because "the mafia is trying to poison them".
How Very "You won't believe what happens next".
WHY is it here on Hacker News? 20 Points???
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
That includes more than hacking and startups.
If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.1. it demonstrates human brains can break in very weird, specific, long-term ways. Same reason HN loves Oliver Sacks.
2. it provides an interesting case-study of a self-consistent worldview which could convince several people for decades and had explanations for all its anomalies, and yet is totally absolutely wrong. Like religion, but more novel and modern a delusion.
3. the way she rationally broke out of it is interesting: not by reading a book on the Mafia and realizing that they would never engage in a persecution like that (far too expensive, requires capabilities they've never had, huge distraction from their many more pressing problems, and goes wildly beyond anything they've actually done hunting the most harmful defectors), but by running a very simple experiment with a negative control. It would not be going too far to say that scientific methodology saved her life.