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.
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.
Ditto. My brother uses some of our stories in his stand-up act sometimes:
Mom: “Unplug the phone! The government is listening to our conversations!”
Brother: “Mom... of course they’re listening, but I don’t care.”