Don't do it without supervision, I nearly jumped 100m because the voices in my head convinced me I'm a Star Trek captain and will be transported to my bridge mid-jump.
Never do anything to confirm a paranoid person's psychosis unless you have total control of the situation and a psychiatrist supervision. Never try to peace them by saying unrealistic things, you never know what's going on in their head that you just confirmed. My GF tried to reassure me by saying she will be with me in 15 minutes, but she was 100km away and I thought "okay well that makes all of this real, let's do it".
Prtty much echoing what you said, in this video Cecila McGough, who has schizophrenia, talks about how important it is that people don't do anything to confirm her hallucinations.
I was wondering why she wasn't looking at the camera or interviewer.
Turns out the reason was that she saw an hallucination in that direction. So she looked away, she explains, in a follow up video 5 years later: (I found via the YouTube comments section)
That's good to know, but it leaves you without many options, since all the experts also suggest not to confront them with reality. So how to interact with somebody who as a psychosis and sees a complete twisted reality?
Call an ambulance. Acute psychosis needs immediate treatment, they may easily hurt themselves or others. The psychosis can be stopped with one injection, don't prolong their suffering. Before the ambulance arrives, try to reassure them that they are safe, there is peace around them and help is on the way. Once the ambulance arrives, go away - it might get messy.
I am not sure from which country you gain your perspective, but in Germany it's not what's gonna happen. Your human right is the highest good, and police or any doctor is only permitted to force you to take drugs or put you in a clinic when you are acute suicidal or you harm others.
Unfortunately I know that first hand.
Since she was 100 km away, it didn't make sense she was going to be there in 15 minutes by normal means, so it meant either she was lying or OP was actually going to be teleported. OP apparently chose to believe the latter, since it confirmed their current delusion.
So it didn't postpone anything, maybe if she had given a realistic ETA (or just said "I'm coming, wait for me") it would have worked though.
It's very difficult to know what to do in these situations though, I've been on the side of that girlfriend and you just can't have a full understand of what's going on in the head of the other person, everything is just walking on eggs, except the eggs are actually landmines.
> I've been on the side of that girlfriend and you just can't have a full understand of what's going on in the head of the other person, everything is just walking on eggs, except the eggs are actually landmines.
The problem here in my opinion is rather that most people are used to lie, manipulate and betray (in society this behaviour is actually euphemized via the term "white lies"). In this particular case, such a behaviour does have consequences. See the example of this thread where the girlfriend claims she will be there in 15 minutes, despite being 100 km away.
Since most people are not used to being honest (or, I assume, actually never were), they give similar descriptions of their difficulties when their lies do have consequences like your "everything is just walking on eggs, except the eggs are actually landmines".
It's a bit more complicated than just "not being used being honest".
Being 100% honest and not hiding anything doesn't work either, so it's a constant balancing act between telling them the truth, reassuring them and sometimes indeed shielding from the harsh truth by avoiding from mentioning something, which I do believe is different from lying. Lying is out of question though and I think the people who resort to that do it out of laziness more than anything, or maybe well-intentioned wishful thinking in the case of the aforementioned girlfriend. But this is always harmful, not just with psychotic persons.
I think what GP is saying is that white lies are not necessarily betrayal. Betrayal is when someone violates your trust somehow. [0] You can see some examples of lying in the wiktionary definition I linked. (see the last two definitions) However, both these definitions involve the lie causing some negative consequence. A white lie is specifically a lie done to spare someones feelings. It's possible that the white lie can cause negative consequences, but that is not always the case.
To take a concrete example, consider the classic white lie "no, that dress doesn't make you look fat". It is possible that this could cause someone to wear an ugly dress, but the person probably looked at themselves in the mirror too, so they probably will end up choosing a dress that doesn't look awful. In this case there is no negative consequence associated with the white lie unless person wearing the dress is unable to accurately self assess. (which is something the speaker hopefully would know about the dress wearer)
You could define being lied to as a violation of your trust. In particular, I think autistic people often can't pick up on social cues, and so rely more on people speaking the truth to them. However, that doesn't mean white lies are betrayal for everyone. If you in particular feel like white lies are betrayal, you might want to tell people in your life that so they know it's important to you. They won't automatically know and it isn't automatically important to them.
A lie is a lie, and GP's point still stands. In effect, you're proving their point by doing everything possible to justify a state of affairs for a preponderance of people whereby it's okay to water down the reality of the situation to "spare them an emotional reaction".
I can understand where GP is coming from. A lot of my professional career even exists because someone has to cut through the massive layer of bullshit and distortion people generate in an org to be able to make substantive statements about what is the truth, born out by quantitative data and observation.
After a while in the field, you really start to lose your appreciation for other people walking around "sparing" one another from the Truth.
I agree that in professional settings, it's usually best for the efficiency of the company to be direct about everything. I also generally prefer that people provide accurate feedback about how I am doing in interpersonal relationships. I do think that "sparing" someone from an emotional reaction is sometimes a reasonable thing to do in an interpersonal relationship though, depending on the relationship.
Back to the dress example. Let's say the dress wearer is my girlfriend, and I have been asked the question "does this dress make me look fat?". Let's also assume I do think this particular dress makes her look fat, but generally find her attractive, and know that she has body image issues. If I answer "yes", or even "that dress isn't particularly flattering on you", she might interpret that as "He thinks the dress makes me look fat" -> "I am fat" -> "I am ugly", which is not actually what I think and not what I want her to think of herself. Even if I try to reassure her that I don't think she's ugly, she might think that my reassurance is a lie. People with insecurities don't always think logically about them. I think "You look beautiful" would probably be the most ideal response, (in that is both true and doesn't cause her to spiral) but if I didn't have time to think about my response, "No, it doesn't make you look fat" feels like a better response than something else which would cause her to spiral.
If I feel the need to actually help her choose the right dress, I can back that up by pointing out exactly how some other dress that looks better on her actually looks good.
Of course, if I feel like she could take it well, then pointing out exactly how the bad dress is bad might be helpful to her. However, I feel like keeping her from spiraling is more important then informing her of every detail of my taste in dresses.
Obviously, I made this scenario very concrete, but I feel like you can't really decide if it is a good idea without that very concrete knowledge. Which is one reason why white lies might be a bad idea in professional settings, where you don't necessarily know how people will respond to things in the first place. (Because you might not know them well)
>"No, it doesn't make you look fat" feels like a better response than something else which would cause her to spiral.
And you're right. It'll feel like the better response; because all of our social circuitry heuristics honed over our lives by a biological imperative to minimize energy expenditure will happily present that as a quick, harmony preserving fix. However, in that case, are you not doing an injustice to your partner with self-image issues by A) bearing false witness to your true feelings on the matter (dress does not fo you any favors, darling) and B) not addressing the pathological denigratory self-image with active confrontation and refutation of the validity thereof, with an accurate accounting of your own reasoning?
Example: I've had that question asked of me while my partnner and I were trying to shopping for wear to attend a wedding in. My partner loves blue. Like BSOD blue. Cobalt electric blue. She was drawn to a dress in that color. She had a friend along that was already giving the customary platitudes, but asked me my thoughts on it. That color, unfortunately, in my eyes, does not love her back. Her skin/complexion tends toward the rosey and warm; a combo which strongly clashes with and fights with said the coolness of the blue, and which would tend to cause the eye to pick out the paler aspects of her instead of accentuating the her livelier parts. The cut, and just how it laid on her body didn't complement her. It hid her best parts, and accentuated the parts I knew she was ultimately more self-conscious about because there wasn't a damn thing to do about them, and the baggage that came with it. The strong blue just visually overwhelmed the visual experience to the point where all you saw was the dress, and how it dominated the image of her; not the person wearing it, with their actions and body being accentuated and emphasized by the dress. I told her if that was what she really wanted, and if it made her feel good, then what does it matter? However, I thought she'd look better either in a purple, or perhaps more importantly a dress of a different cut. One that instead of looking like a wrapper, would actually lay on her body in a way that would naturally draw the eye to her, and what she was doing.
End result? She kept looking. She ended up picking out a pattern and cut that she felt was more befitting for her role/relation to the two getting married (deep or high saturation colors are apparently reserved for the bridesmaids per her thoughts on the subject, and something a bit more matronly made her feel more comfortable at the event). She also picked up a dress I thought really made her look gorgeous, and I adore seeing her looking regal af in, and wouldn't be out of place at about any event.
I acknowledged, and reaffirmed that ultimately, the most important thing was how she felt. I also provided a truthful evaluation about the answer to the question, giving her more insight about how I see things,the things I look at, and the affect they have on me; and as it turned out, she's gotten way more use out of the dress she ultimately picked than she'd ever have been comfortable getting out of the blue one. So by taking the path of truth, I opened a door to a novel experience for her, and she says she's happier for having done so.
Not to mention, you're kind of doing yourself an injustice by not really valuing your own feelings on the matter. I'm not saying that it's okay to tell someone the dress looks them look like they're wearing a trash bag; but it's absolutely okay to express your feelings on something in that type of circumstance, even if your rational side tells you that maybe you should be silent. The only way to help someone through the healing process is to acknowledge there is something there, and to be supportive and truthful. Placing care about everyone else above your own care for yourself is as sure a recipe for a bad time as any. One can't wholely and truly give for others what one does not yet possess for themselves have.
It may not necessarily win one many invites to fancy parties, but I've found that getting into the habit of twisting things makes the process of growth, healing, or recovery so ruinously complicated as to present an overall harm in comparison to the brief cauterizing application of truthful, sincere communication. See the cleverest code as compared to the most straightforward as applied to social dynamics. Many of the same principles transfer.
I acknowledge that all lies are going to make things more difficult in the long run while making things easier in the short run. I would like to point out that sometimes things need to be easier in the short run though. In code terms this is something like technical debt.
Getting back to the example. If there is some combination of not being close enough, (in the example, lets say just started dating) and insecurities running too high, then they won't necessarily trust your reasoning. They might just feel like you are attacking them, or that you are trying to cover for not reacting fast enough. The end result is that they now feel ugly and like their date hates them. This won't make their body image issues any better.
While I've not dated anyone with that level of insecurity, I've been friends with a some, though none of them had body image issues specifically. In my experience they have to both trust you quite a bit, and also be ready to confront their own insecurities. I've tried to speak my mind clearly to one friend who evidently weren't ready to process their insecurities, and in the end it just seemed to make them feel bad and also hurt our friendship. They seemed to feel like I was attacking them and making excuses in a manner similar to what I talked about in the example. I've had some level of success with another friend, but they had actually expressed self-awareness and a desire to change. My current policy is to keep away from people's insecurities unless they express a desire to change or ask me to be brutally honest.
I could choose to only let people into my life that don't need me to route around their insecurities. However, I do want to be available to people who need emotional support, which means occasionally placing myself in a position where I need to be careful with people. My actual weapon of choice here is to re-frame the situation, because I'm pretty terrible at lying convincingly and also don't enjoy doing it. An example of a re-frame is the "you look beautiful" in my first post. However, re-frames are also a stop-gap measure as other people won't do such re-frames on their own. What I am doing is not technically deception, but I don't feel like the sort of deception that white lies are composed of has significantly worse side effects. They are both just a way to push the issue down the road. Furthermore, coming up with re-frames is a moderately difficult skill that I have specifically cultivated, and I think white lies are easier to do "untrained". Thus, if someone is put on the spot, I'd prefer if they didn't write off white lies just because they fit the definition of lie.
As far as your comments on doing myself dirty. Guilty as charged, I certainly have work to do on that front.
To me GP seems like an insane person with an out of whack understanding of what "white lies" are and what's going on in that social dynamic. I think they need to seriously get a grip. Normally I wouldn't write things like this on HN because it's rude and they're a complete stranger anyway and I don't know what's in their head, but I wouldn't want to "betray" them by not saying it.
I think I spelled it out in the post you are referencing, but I see a white lie as the equivalent of "not saying something because it is rude", except for when you are forced to say something and not doing so would be meaningful.
I'm pretty curious about what you think white lies do in a social dynamic though. I'd appreciate it if you could elaborate.
EDIT: My post is literally your GP, but based on your stance earlier in this thread, I think you were talking about aleph_minus_one's post I was responding to. In which case I think our opinions are similar?
Yes I was talking about aleph_minus_one's post, apologies for the confusion (I got a bit mixed up). Unfortunately it's too late to edit it.
In terms of the social dynamic I agree with you, the "white lies" serve as a way to be considerate of the other person. And it's not just "lies" about them either, if someone is in a hurry or in some casual context and asks how I am and I've had a shitty day, I might say "I'm fine" to avoid them feeling the need to talk through my problems with me. If someone asks at dinner and I spent the morning having explosive diarrhea, I don't share that either. That is a classic white lie but to see that as a betrayal strikes me as extremely bizarre.
I believe you when you say that white lies violate your trust. I'm saying that that experience isn't universal though. Different people define violations of their trust differently. Thus my suggestion at the end to make sure that the people around you know that this is part of your definition. (Though you might have already done this)
>sometimes indeed shielding from the harsh truth by avoiding from mentioning something, which I do believe is different from lying.
You mean lying by omission? A.k.a. not speaking the quiet part? It's still received and noted by the other person you know. Likely by the part of the psyche they haven't got consciously integrated, or are experiencing a connectivity problem with.
Remember, that part of them is still a very big chunk of human neural processor. It isn't stupid. It's also not terribly capable of straightforwardly communicating. What it is scarily good at is navigating the external world, which includes seeing the void of what one doesn't say. If it's already running amok, pouring more fuel in the form of duplicity on the fire is probably not the greatest idea.
In the particular example, the girlfriend did lie to him by telling him she'll be there in 15 minutes despite being 100 km away. This exactly lead to the strange chain of thoughts.
In this particular case, it was sort of the opposite. I'm used to her always being honest, so when she told me it's 15 minutes I trusted her 100%. She was getting a friend to rescue me, and she was counting on me trusting her and waiting at home, but unfortunately that was of no use as I went off to the city before they could even pack their things after that call.
Should she have been more honest and said "X will be their shortly. I'm really worried about you, please stay put."? Just trying to follow this chain of reasoning.
Yes, that would work. I was really looking for confirmation, so if she said something like this the issue could be avoided. But who knows what I'd come up with 10 minutes later...
This is the reason that I've only ever done LSD once.
It wasn't especially anxiety inducing for the most part and was quite fun, but I feel as if I just got lucky and that in a slightly different circumstance I could just have convinced myself that my apartment window was in fact the front door and fall out of it.
Retrospectively, it was a total blunder - not truly hers since she couldn't be expected to act perfectly in that situation, but it's definitely something we've discussed as the TOP ONE thing to never do and always mention it to others when discussing situations like that.
It didn't postpone anything. I called her because I knew I'm going mad and wanted to confirm if it's true or not. Of course I didn't word it this way, though. What she said confirmed the delusion, nearly got me killed and even though I didn't jump, I got lost in the city, hurt myself, nearly hurt others, until someone called the police few hours later.
You're reading into it too much. You don't think you're actually Picard or Kirk, you think the world around you is very similar to the stories, but not actually the story itself.
In my case, it went like this: Whoa, my crew is telepathically beaming me instructions and we are right in the middle of a mission. Where the fuck am I? Crew, give me my command protocols. Oh, I command a starship? Sure, sorry, the heat around here, I might be hit with something, I don't remember, help me! Oh, you're going to transport me? Sure, go ahead, let me just run away from this commando waiting on the hallway using the only other exit - the window... Now it makes sense that I'm a starship captain, why would a commando be waiting there otherwise...
Without supervision? What good is that? This is a disease that breaks people. Those who would convince themselves to see such symptoms in a positive light are doing nothing but damage.
Yes. What I mean is that doing it can have unintended consequences - so don't do it if you don't know what you're doing and/or not fully in control of the situation.
I find this fascinating. Could you please elaborate about anything youd find relevant/interesting about how such delusions come about without being obvious delusions? I cant imagine actually believing I am Star Trek captain, but I sure can believe someone else do. I just cant imagine how that must feel/look like inside that someones head.
At the beginning, you know you're mad. I remember the first hour or so, I was thinking "no fucking way this is real". But it feels so real that you quickly stop believing anyone who says otherwise and you mark them as the enemies. Your head keeps inventing reasons why is it real and the voices keep explaining it - in some cases it's religious experiences, in my case it's hyper-advanced technology enabling telepathic communication.
I didn't think it's the Star Trek from movies, I just thought we somehow made it work in secret and now I'm on it too. Paranoid people aren't paranoid just so, they are paranoid because there is a brutal mismatch between their perception of reality and what people tell them.
At one point, in a different situation, I knew I'm in the middle of psychosis - and my voices told me all about super-agent-psychiatrists who are trying to help me by doing James Bond-style interventions. So yeah, you can simultaneously know you're right in the middle of it, and discuss the situation with your delusions, while thinking the delusions are real.
How do you know it isn't true? Philip K Dick came to believe in his psychosis visions (he believed he truly was in Rome in 60AD or so but was being fed a created world by the Romans). But he had good personal evidence for it that he couldn't deny even in a non-psychotic state. Do you have anything like that?
I guess a better way to phrase it is, do you have compelling evidence that your beliefs are true that you have to force yourself to ignore, or does it just seem like nonsense when you aren't in a psychotic state?
Not OP, my manic episodes come with extreme paranoia, and I have had two psychotic breaks during really bad ones. This may be a completely different experience. Apologies if I sound a bit flippant.
For myself, my brain always knows what reality is because all of my senses work. Delusions are clearly internal. My self-awareness is firmly in reality but all I can do is watch myself react as if the delusions are reality.
Many people can’t grasp this. Awareness and control are always linked. “Blind rage” is just that. Awareness is gone.
I hope no one else ever has to experience being powerless in their own body and screaming uselessly in their head to make it stop.
As horrifying as this sounds, these experiences don’t haunt me. I thought they were just burnout from stress and carried on like nothing happened afterwards.
“Normalization of deviance” doesn’t even begin to describe my life experience. Eventually, I was convinced by my doctor to see a psychiatrist for ADHD. It wasn’t until my third visit she realized I had severe, high-functioning bipolar. Once I got over a month of denial, it was “Okay. That does explain a lot.” XD
You're not suddenly irrational in a psychosis, you still have your logic working, just with crooked inputs. So it took me months to sort through some details and make sense of what actually happened and what didn't. There are some things I'm probably never going to be able to explain and I just have to leave it like that. But I don't believe any of my delusions happened, I just would like to know what happened.
All the voices, and the sense of urgency and danger go away immediately when you wake up after a dose of antipsychotic medication. Your first thoughts are that you lived through some weird things which are not happening at all anymore, and now there's a psychiatrist untying you from a hospital bed and handing you a cigarette, which puts stuff into context. You also probably feel the best you felt in weeks/months because it's your first night of sleep since forever.
I can easily imagine someone thinking "well, I had a psychosis, but there was shit going on". Fortunately that's not me.
This is your personal experience, but I'll note there are others who do become irrational along with having altered perception. It's hard to give generalized descriptions.
So, rather than just having some false facts, they will make bizarre "inference" steps in thinking that can border on free-association. In the case of one of my relatives, this process would accompany something almost like amnesia. After a burst of this illogical reasoning that gets way out into the weeds for tens of minutes or hours, she would seem to lose track of it and "reset" in some way to start again.
Out of this recurrence, you could start to sense an overall theme that was evolving at a different time scale, beneath all the illogical tangents. Even through different phases of treatment and remission, those themes would resurface as a sort of barometer of her illness. There wasn't always as stark of a difference between normal days and psychotic break days.
I really appreciate your responses (and ones others have made elsewhere in this thread), they give much better insight into what someone is going through internally than the clinical definitions I see.
Just a general piece of advice: when a person is discussing their struggles with psychotic delusions, its kind of messed up to say "Yeah, but how do you know they aren't real?"
Given the context in this conversation about how confirming a delusion can be dangerous, I think the concern is just that there may be situations where asking this genuine and interesting question could cause harm.
I think probably that on balance you've got away with it though because the people commenting seem to be safely outside the other side of their psychosis and are able to answer interestingly without being harmed by the question.
Yeah, it was odd because the first time I told a psychiatrist that I heard voices, it was because of a split-second incident out in the street where I swear I heard a distinct vocalization from the vicinity of a traffic light. No human was there, of course, and the illusion was over before it began.
That was enough to slap a prescription on me for years to come.
Eventually I began to question why they kept wanting to prescribe this stuff and why one of the standard questions was always "do you hear voices?" and I also began to question their terminology. "What do you mean, by hearing voices?" "Oh, well, hallucinations." and I drilled down into their definitions and epistemology for a while.
I told them that I am a Christian, and of course I hear voices. People of faith, who are quite sane, discuss this openly all the time. We are always encouraged to listen to the voice of Jesus, the voice of the Holy Spirit, to listen to the voices of those who wrote Sacred Scripture. I told the doc that I'd be crazy (and lost, and significantly more troubled) if I didn't hear anyone's voice.
Of course they're probing for stuff to medicate, they're probing for irrationality, and they're probing for evil voices who goad us to do harm to ourselves or to others. And of course I was troubled by those types too.
But they weren't unreal. They weren't hallucinations because the sources exist in reality. They don't come from human bodies, but spirits are real to Christians.
The solution is not to medicate the voices or deny that the voices exist or to ignore the voices, it's to form our consciences so that we can stand up to lies, stand up to temptation, and resist evil. It's as simple as that. Whether the voices come from Mom and Dad, or social media, or television, or they're 100% in our heads, we need to discern their spirits, and deal with them according to our conscience.
It was so jarring that the doctors would be goading me to deny my faith in this way and to claim that if I heard a voice encouraging me in a moral direction, that it was fake, a hallucination, a disease. I have been so profoundly insulted. This is one of the many reasons I lost trust in them.
A hallmark feature of psychosis and schizophrenia is lack of "insight", meaning that the patient can't recognize that they are having delusions, nor the fact that they are suffering from the illness. The belief that you are a Star Trek captain feels as real as knocking on wood.
The illnesses simultaneously cause hallucinations that enforce delusions, and twist your belief systems so you pick up on the most insignificant details to support your delusions. Almost all patients end up believing that they are god, Star Trek captains, or stalked by a government agency, because this best explains their (hallucinatory) experiences. For example, if you hear voices in your head, the patient can't usually understand it as an illness, but has to explain it in some other way, so you end up with CIA/god/whatever beaming voices into your head.
For myself, my imagination and view of reality merged. My senses were fine but all of the processing and my imagination started writing to the same memory spaces.
I was aware that my senses didn’t match what I was processing. It didn’t matter.
That's what happens to kids. Up to eight years old, if I recall correctly, they're unable to tell apart imagination from reality. If they think of something, say a monster hiding at home, it exists in reality. Which is a big problem while watching movies that can have scary parts as they now think they're real.
A six year old can perceive normally. They really don’t see people who aren’t there. They consciously know the difference between seeing a monster and thinking it exists. They can mis-attribute information by categorizing something they see as a monster. They play and they get really invested in it. Children are not psychotic. They are using their imagination to explore reality.
I see the monsters in the room. I spent four months as a bipedal wolf feeling wind in my fur and the motions of my tail. I truly believed I wasn’t human and the humans would kill me as soon as they found that out. My childhood memories were replaced by imagined ones.
Well, the part of believing they are something they aren't, I agree, it doesn't happen to them. But I have kids and they positively believe there are monsters in the house, and they positively believe toys are alive, because they saw toy story. Nothing I can say will move them from that belief.
I've had sleep walking episodes for most of my life since I was about 5, probably driven by sleep apnea. I've also had experiences that are as real as this waking life while meditating and especially back in my party days.
The real awakening for me was when it finally clicked that we are always hallucinating everything. The mind separates our conscious awareness from the 3D world, like in Plato's Allegory of the Cave. So what we see and hear isn't what's objectively real, but what our mind interprets it to be. Even though everything is real in our subjective reality, based on the contextual state that we've built up from the sum of our experiences.
Some examples of mass psychosis:
* Many people don't know that their boss charges more than they're paid in wages.
* Many people work administrative and loss-leader jobs and perceive their work as a cost on the organization (programmers, engineers, most people outside of sales).
* Many people think that those around them are more knowledgeable and/or experienced than they are, and don't realize that their manager or boss is mostly winging it based on a probabilistic estimate of the best course of action.
* Many people think that they are more knowledgeable and/or experienced than everyone around them (egocentric people working in IT/tech, doctors, lawyers, billionaires, etc).
* Many people think that everyone else shares their spiritual worldview, everything from a man in the sky to we're all one in universal consciousness.
* Many people think that others don't share their spiritual worldview (Christianity and Judaism may not see parents giving up their meals for their starving children in a bombed out Islamic community).
How can we have civilized society, including free and fair elections, under such mass hysteria? When people have so many delusions that politicians can pit half the population against the other merely be selecting sides from a short list of wedge issues?
My personal feeling is that western culture can't really endure spiritual awakening. And that we are seeing the breakdown of western society under late-stage capitalism with societal psychoses like much of the working class having to pay 50% of its income in rents. And corporate-greed-driven inflation rising unchecked without updated tax brackets for progressive taxation. And social safety nets being shredded to create a desperate working class dependent on service work while corporate profits are at an all-time high.
I just wish I knew how to wake up from The Matrix, whatever all this is. The points above have concrete solutions like a national tenant union, enforcing antitrust laws, taxing unrealized stock gains the same way as property taxes on homes, etc. But those obvious solutions assume a level of lucidity that will probably never exist while the powers that be lobby the government and engage in regulatory capture while handing out million dollar checks at random to voters who selected the candidate that promises to cut rich people's taxes. All to keep most people worried about the price of groceries and immigrants stealing their jobs.
But hey, I'm the delusional one.
Edit: the best answer I've come up with so far, after suffering for a lifetime under self-imposed limitations driven by many of the psychoses above, was to quiet my internal monologue entirely, acknowledging each thought but not indulging it, just being consciously aware of the process of living, without attachment or expectation on outcomes.
Never do anything to confirm a paranoid person's psychosis unless you have total control of the situation and a psychiatrist supervision. Never try to peace them by saying unrealistic things, you never know what's going on in their head that you just confirmed. My GF tried to reassure me by saying she will be with me in 15 minutes, but she was 100km away and I thought "okay well that makes all of this real, let's do it".