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Reminds me of Gang stalking[0]. It always seems to happen to people who present themselves as generally not very mentally healthy, but sometimes you have to wonder. If you were the very unlucky target of some deniable, organized harassment effort, it would certainly take its toll on your mental health.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_stalking







Tangentially related indeed, though all the really funny writers must have gone to Clickhole when that launched


Damn. I was in jail with a lot of very mentally sick people, and this hits too close to home!


The Stasi term for this was Zersetzung: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung


You may want to dig into gangstalking as a cultural phenomenon before you legitimize it with that equivalency.

This is not cherry-picked; I just went to the subreddit and found a relatively recent post: https://old.reddit.com/r/Gangstalking/comments/tf2xd0/they_a....

(Spoilers: the number of people in amphetamine psychosis is several orders of magnitude larger than the number of victims of targeted government harassment.)


Yeah, if you look at the post history of the people posting there you will see a lot of posts about meth. Or maybe their mental health is what led them to meth in the first place, because you'd think the meth induced psychosis would wane off over time. But for most of them the delusions keep getting stronger and it can last for year. It's really heartbreaking and the entire paranoid concept of gangstalking makes helping them very very difficult


Worth noting that if you actually ARE being tailed by an organized and well-resourced group, they will frequently use a team of people to do so, time and circumstances permitting.


This is probably why it's very hard to help someone who is under legitimately delusional feelings of gang stalking, because those who legitimately are and those who are delusional are likely to look the same to outsiders, and will always be considered delusional.

If a person is suffering from strong enough paranoia to classify themselves as a "targeted individual", then they've probably walked through the scenario that they might be crazy but also realized that if their paranoia is accurate, then they would also have appeared to be crazy.

It's a vicious cycle.


I feel similarly about describing political aspirants as narcissistic or sociopathic based on their "delusions of grandeur" – what about when they actually become president? Not so delusional anymore, I guess? It calls into question the validity of such a diagnosis in the first place, as anything more than a measurement of deviance from some arbitrary and counterfactually ambiguous statistical mean. It's almost as if the entire field of psychiatry harbors delusions of grandeur...


"delusions of grandeur" can mean many things. Someone who thinks they’re a genius and wins a popularity contest is not now provably a genius.

Someone who believes themselves to be the fastest athlete is not so when their opponent falls down and they win the race.


Don't whatever you do go here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Gangstalking/


I tried to go there, but I was directed to install the app and there was no option to continue browsing on the web. Reddit dark patterns have come to a point where they are literally disabling the web frontend for mobile users?


Add the old subdomain to avoid the mobile stuff. The link is a subreddit of people complaining about being stalked and then trailing off into other conspiracies.

Edit: old.reddit.com/r/gangstalking




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