I think a huge source of blame lies in organizations like the NSA/CIA that have proven to be deceptive / secretive / manipulative. There is a long history of secret experiements done by government that breeds distrust. Add mental health issues and the internet and you have a cauldron which can easily brew up this sort of thing.
I think a good type of treatment for this would be body cameras and mikes which a therapist could review with a patient and provide them with rational explanations.
[As a disclaimer, the following is not an elaborate troll. When I was a practicing scholar of American Literature, psychoanalysis was one of my areas of specialization. What I write below is/was characteristic of psychoanalytic thought in the context of literary and cultural studies. Having left academia 7 years ago, I can see how some of my fellow HNers might be suspicious of such a seemingly convoluted and obtuse form of discourse.]
Though you've been downvoted, the structure of your seemingly casual observation is validated by some of the most renown psychoanalytic and philosophical thinkers of the 20th and 21st centuries. (In the US, psychoanalysis is largely repudiated as a therapeutic pathway for severe mental illness such as paranoid schizophrenia. However, philosophy and psychoanalytic thinking can provide occasionally valuable insights into the nature of human psychology, each capable of being productive and provocative in equal measure.)
In _Jacques Lacan's Four Discourses_ (Lacan has been referred to as the "French Freud"), Slavoj Zizek asks readers to
> Recall, again, Lacan's outrageous statements that, even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological. [0]
This is probably a misattribution by Zizek (or a conflation) since Sigmund Freud makes the comparison in the _Standard Edition_ (XVIII, 226).
> Freud suggests that a jealous husband who is obsessed with the idea that his wife is cheating on him can be described as paranoid even if it turns out that his wife is cheating on him. [1]
Without question, the priapic over-concern with the possibility of spousal infidelity is characteristic of masculinist psychoanalytic discourse. However, the kernel of truth in this is that one's internal representation is separate from reality, however closely the two may match. In other words, paranoia is pathological (belief in gang-stalking) even if it is matched by a dysfunctional reality (CIA surveillance) and this can be seen in the opposite case of a naive subject who neither suspects nor fears being surveilled despite being surveilled in reality (e.g. a psychologically healthy subject who is targeted by state surveillance).
In short, paranoid fantasies may in fact be matched by reality, but that does not make the paranoid fantasies any less paranoid. Conversely, blissful ignorance may be contradicted by reality, but that does not necessarily make the subject any less blissful.
(As a bonus, the paragraph from which the Zizek quote is drawn continues in its next sentence to explain how anti-Semitism draws upon psychopathological thinking to validate its ideological end. In other words, anti-Semitism for Zizek is structurally/phenomenologically identical to paranoia.)
It seems to play right into paranoid fantasy, and perhaps precipitate it in cases, that to be ignorant of a hostile cultural reality is tagged as "mentally healthy".
I guess another way to think about it is that irrational fears remain irrational even if they turn out to be true. If you don't have a reasonable justification for your fears, then it is purely a coincidence that the fears happen to be true.
I'd say that's not another way to think about it rather than exactly what mistersquid was saying, stripped of all the psychobabble (and I say that with degree of affection for French Fraud and his ilk).
Something similar can be seen in depression. I've gone through multiple periods of depression, and I noticed quite a difference in quality between them. While it can probably not be generalized, I noticed that the stronger, more vivid and often shorter periods of depression often least matched reality in hindsight, whereas the dragging, nagging, longer periods of depression often felt justified even in hindsight. Even now, for example, I don't feel that my perspective has fundamentally changed since my last long period of depression; I just don't feel bad about it.
The fact that I felt bad about a situation that other people don't feel bad about was what made me 'someone dealing with depression', not the objective facts of my life.
Realizing this, combined with buddhist thought and practice, has made it easier for me to deal with depression, social anxiety (which often includes quite a bit of paranoia), and my changing moods in general.
Likely, since even in a situation where they were the subject of a real campaign, inducing clinical degree of paranoia would very likely be an objective.
> I think a good type of treatment for this would be body cameras and mikes which a therapist could review with a patient and provide them with rational explanations.
That just means the therapist has been got to and is now One of Them.
You know someone who has believed they were recording something that they were not? Were they watching the output of the recording, while still believing "it" was occurring?
The person recording clearly believes he's captured evidence of spys tracking him, yet the footage seems to show an ordinary trip to the subway with fellow pedestrians minding their own business. And there seem to be many other videos along those same lines.
I hadn't clicked that link before. The narrator doesn't make many substantive claims that can be tested. He mostly just says a particular person was there, which the video seems to show.
I was thinking of some of the more testable claims made in the article. For instance, the person who claimed that their behavior was being mimicked.
I have been in that position, the person when asked will usually just reinforce their position with a statement like "It was there, I swear it was.", fault their recording technique, or their equipment.
Believing your mind is playing tricks on you is really the last ditch effort at rationalizing something for most people. They don't come to that conclusion easily without some sort of history or practice doing so.
I think a good type of treatment for this would be body cameras and mikes which a therapist could review with a patient and provide them with rational explanations.