
'The story of a weird world I was warned never to tell' - meigwilym
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-42951788
======
knodi123
Reminds me of the family of my highschool girlfriend. They were constantly in
danger from magical and spiritual attacks coordinated by agents of satan.

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".

~~~
rpowers
My mom has paranoid schizophrenia and growing up it was always fearing that
the FBI is listening in or poisoning the water. I remember the first CD I ever
bought (a Smash Mouth album) was taken by her and broken multiple times. She
considered any shiny surface to be a potential camera/microphone. This story
is so close to home I wonder if there might be some schizophrenics in it.

~~~
dvtv75
Both of my paternal uncles had paranoid schizophrenia. In the 50s, the police
were called and confiscated their rifles, after they went on a (bloodless)
rampage around the neighborhood.

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.

------
shkkmo
> Pauline contacted the author of the paper, a psychiatrist at Harvard
> University. He was very excited to hear her story. Stan had all the
> hallmarks of a person with delusional disorder, he said. Another academic,
> the leading expert on the disorder, agreed.

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.

~~~
sterlind
1\. Stan starts making up the story to control 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.

------
Terr_
> "The story was that some people who had been around us during my childhood,
> who were involved with organised crime, had been picked up - arrested,
> killed or otherwise disappeared - and then replaced by doubles," Pauline
> says.

One name for this phenomenon is Capgras Delusion:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capgras_delusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capgras_delusion)

------
jacquesm
This reminds me of Scientology.

------
knowuh
Spoiler:

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???

~~~
gwern
What I like about it (the horrible meaningless title aside which gives you no
idea of what it is about) is that:

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.

