I was talking to a friend recently. I was telling them that I felt like maybe I was hallucinating my diagnosis because so many people around me also had been diagnosed.
She pointed out that we both like to be around people that understand. They don’t get mad when we interrupt each other because they are struggling with the same thing.
Collective delusion/hallucination is a real thing. Often reinforced when like minded individuals form a tight social group that serves to isolate them from anyone who might challenged the hallucination, and who seek to reinforce it in each other.
Human beings are prone to mass hysteria because we are social animals, and our ‘truth’ about the world is largely a construct of our agreement with our peers. Psychological illness and behaviors, like anorexia, paranoia, etc. are transmissible psychological conditions. They are ideas in your head that eventually become the truth of your reality as they are reinforced by the ideas and realities of the people around you, and part of the drive to do that is for people to have their ideals/realities validated by others.
I was talking to a friend recently. I was telling them that I felt like maybe I was hallucinating my diagnosis because so many people around me also had been diagnosed.
She pointed out that we both like to be around people that understand. They don’t get mad when we interrupt each other because they are struggling with the same thing.
She was so right.
You could also both be hallucinating.
Collective delusion/hallucination is a real thing. Often reinforced when like minded individuals form a tight social group that serves to isolate them from anyone who might challenged the hallucination, and who seek to reinforce it in each other.
Human beings are prone to mass hysteria because we are social animals, and our ‘truth’ about the world is largely a construct of our agreement with our peers. Psychological illness and behaviors, like anorexia, paranoia, etc. are transmissible psychological conditions. They are ideas in your head that eventually become the truth of your reality as they are reinforced by the ideas and realities of the people around you, and part of the drive to do that is for people to have their ideals/realities validated by others.