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I’m not at all surprised that the real patients could spot them. For all that psychs love to talk about us ‘lacking insight’ I’ve found far more useful insight, advice and basically informal therapy* from other crazies than any psychiatric professional has been able to give me.

I don’t mean to malign Scott’s profession here – or at least, not him by association, as he sounds like exactly the guy I would want dealing with my head – but there are serious problems here.

* in the sense that the distinction between ‘some crazies drink non-alcoholic beer, bitch about their shrinks and generally talk openly about stuff’ and ‘group therapy’ is not one that I find particularly meaningful.

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The APA probably does give to “both sides” in the sense that they give to expected winners in both parties. They presumably avoid giving any money to candidates in either party who are not likely to win.

(Note that due to gerrymandering and regional variations in party strength, almost every district is safely Republican or safely Democratic. Few members of the Michigan Legislature face meaningful opposition from the other party. Other states are similar.)

So, yes, I expect that their statistic is literally true, that 95% of their contributions end up in the hands of winning campaigns.

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And thankfully, there are people out there, like Wikileaks and friends, who are very good at monitoring such suspicious behavior, and telling us about it.

Spy agencies’ capabilities are, as always, limited by what they risk by using the capabilities they have. Neither of us are probably important enough to warrant targeted surveillance (though I was on my guard for a while after Snowden replied to my question about civil disobedience). In the event that we are spied upon, we have more potential to cause damage by catching them in the act, than they have to win by spying on us.

Mass surveillance, though, is another matter.

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In actuality, their behaviour was probably more a consequence of assuming I was more crazy than I was (or at least, that the cause of a statement or behaviour couldn’t be something other than my craziness).

Specifically, they:

Denied the existence of silverfish (bugs) in a hospital room when I pointed them out, and only when a nurse huffily agreed to come with me to confirm that I was just seeing things did she admit that they were real.

When I was permitted to go on a walk with my mum who was visiting, obviously didn’t believe me about some of the dry grass in the car park smoking as if about to catch fire from the sun/heat. I presume someone later caught this as the car park didn’t burn down, but the point is my non-crazy mum saw it too and refusing to believe me and telling me I was seeing things just made me feel more crazy and as if they were trying to make me crazy.

When I heard am alarm go off, insisted that I hadn’t heard anything instead of explaining when asked what it was for.

So, I’m kind of not surprised by these ideas.

I mean, psychiatric hospital itself is an environment where people are watching you and recording your behaviour all the time while refusing to explain to you why or show you what they’re writing – it’s like it’s tailor-made to make you more paranoid.

Edit: Proposed experiment – treat neurotypical people the way psychiatric inpatients are treated and see how long it takes for them to develop paranoia.

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(I think you’re joking. But it’s a bit sad that I’m not sure).

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You could try as many times as you wanted, and you also had free access to the difficulty setting part of the machine. They weren’t conducting addiction research on us, although I think the allusion was deliberate.

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