[pahool]

I appreciate your clarification, but the assertion that "conspiracy theorists are overwhelming[ly] just mentally ill to begin with" is exactly what I'm refuting.

I suppose part of it is a matter of definition, since there is a spectrum of belief in unproven "conspiracy theories". Is a "conspiracy theorist" one who believes in a conspiracy theory, or one who creates conspiracy theories? Is someone who believes that there may have been a conspiracy associated with the JFK assassination a "conspiracy theorist"? They're certainly not on the same level as someone who willfully defies all evidence and logic to continue to assert that the Earth is flat. There's a spectrum of the amount of deviance from logic and evidence as well of a spectrum of the strength of one's belief in these "theories".

I think that a large number of people subscribe to some sort of unproven "conspiracy theory" and that it is incorrect to assert that this population is overwhelmingly mentally ill.

If you use people who go to a flat earth convention as your basis for a representative sample of the mental health of conspiracy theorists, I think you're going to get a very skewed result. You're skewing very high on the spectrum of deviance from evidence and logic, as well as very high on the spectrum of strength of belief.

I would probably agree with your assertion if my definition of what constituted a "conspiracy theorist" met a minimum criteria of a certain threshold value on those two spectrums, but I think that the term "conspiracy theorist" is very nuanced and therefore problematic and even dangerous, especially when we start throwing around phrases like "conspiracy theorists are overwhelming[ly] just mentally ill to begin with". Here's an interesting article on the topic of "conspiracy theory" as a dangerous misnomer:

http://theconversation.com/in-defence-of-conspiracy-theories...