I have no proof (or way to test this), but I’ve thought for a while that some pathogen has infected a good number of people, and damaged their brains. I find it hard to understand many people’s transition into madness any other way.
I am not talking about “I believe bubble up economics you believe trickle down so you’re crazy” kind of disagreements, I mean stuff like “lizard people from planet nibiru are eating the children of flat earth which is why the shadow government is injecting you with 5g to make you magnetic” kind of stuff.
I have watched several seemingly normal people go more and more crazy, and a pathogen (or maybe long Covid?) seems like a possible reason.
I don’t think it’s new, just more visible than it used to be.
When I was a teenager, I took the New Age/occult section of the bookstore seriously[0]. It feels silly in retrospect, but it’s not really any weirder than the religious beliefs I was brought up with, nor the presence of horoscopes in all the newspapers and advertised elsewhere without getting banned under the Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951, nor the then-new National Lottery being shown with a regular segment by a fortune teller called Mystic Meg, nor the endless TV shows about ancient aliens and ghosts and telepathy, and you might be surprised how long people continued to say crop circles “had to be supernatural” after their secret was revealed to be two blokes and a stick.
Edit: Oh, and my mum insisted on handing out homeopathic sand and white paint pigment[2]. And the Bach flower remedies “for memory” (she got Alzheimer’s 20 years younger than her mum). Plus all the stuff about crystal powers, dowsing rods, the whole caboodle.
[0] So, naturally I tried the shape-shifting turn-yourself-into-a-werewolf spell I found online[1], and now I’m a furry.
I unironically blame the pervasiveness of drugs, namely cannabis and alcohol. They seem to be causing serious damage in a large subset of the population. Perhaps it has always been the case but we are more aware of such issues now.
However I know several people who are not drug users have similarly sunk into a state of paranoia or madness. Truly a sad state of affairs and I hope we can identify it, and treat them if possible because it seems telling them outright their thoughts/actions are manic is perceived as an insult.
I think that the current legitimacy crisis is the cause for this. Once you have one core source/belief invalidated, it's super easy to slide into more fringe views.
Anyone that has had to deal with any sort of customer support after Covid knows that things just aren’t right. It’s like talking to people from another planet. I don’t know if it is Covid brain or what.
Have noticed that. Also, some agencies that are required to work with people (no way to automate that) remain incredibly under-staffed and/or have huge work backloads piled up. One told me the other day (after a two-hour phone battle to reach a real person) that there were no appointments available for 'over a month'.
It would be interesting to see the interplay of social isolation and the psychological impact of parasites/viruses. The history of population bottlenecks in humans (and other species) might be informative. Social isolation tends to increase when plague wipes out a good chunk of a population (e.g., the black death).
Fun thought: The toxoplasma gondii wants to spread, and it's gonna make its victim go out and socialize, even if that means breaking COVID rules. The more push back there is, the more reckless and crazy the victims get.
The isolation from covid restrictions, combined with loads of the major conspiracy talking points coming true[0], could easily lead people down this big rabbit hole if their brain is so inclined. I know my brain tends to think in this way and I really felt the pull into crazy land. I mostly avoided going too far and as things have opened up I think I'm now back to a more reasonable view of reality, but I have sympathy for and understanding of the people who became this way recently.
[0] mandatory vaccinations, health passports, cashless society, great reset, etc etc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis maybe? "Up to half of the world's population is infected by toxoplasmosis, but have no symptoms." (No symptoms that we/they know of but read about how it affects mice. Makes them crazy reckless and wanna go get eaten by a cat.)
It is possible they were always that susceptible(I suspect they were), someone just needed the means for mass delivery and when it was available(social media) they weaponized it at just the right time.
This is highly speculative stuff, but... that's the point. I think people sometimes forget that the was a time when nothing was scientifically proven.
I'm surprised Lyme disease wasn't mentioned, as I think it also falls into the bucket of latent diseases that can cause unquantified effects much later down the line.
At least the title, "Endemic Pathogens Are Making You Crazy And Then Killing You", can be accepted as a default prior, rather than an extraordinary claim. Many diseases are both prevalent and not under heavy study. Funding and interest in studying a disease is partially caused by individuals being able to link the disease to a symptom, and this is hard without data. (You rolled a 4, but is the die biased toward 4? It's impossible to tell from a single roll.) When these diseases are occasionally looked into, such as with hookworm and toxoplasmosis, the track record finds harms at an alarming rate, so we should expect the remaining diseases, which are not yet looked into, to have similar rates of danger.
Thus, without making assertions on the article's individual claims, the general thrust is broadly true. The reason people hold the "these diseases are generally harmless" prior is likely from another prior, "if X disease were so harmful, doctors would be studying it", and that unfortunately does not match current practice.
Covid-19 provides an example of how hard it is to link symptoms. We know now that anosmia is solidly connected to Covid-19, but this was not known for a while. The CDC only listed three official symptoms six months after the outbreak [0], reflecting the understanding at the time. Doctors talked about their patients and found commonalities; this bubbled anecdotes into attention. So even with intense and joint attention by the world, with a clear and reliable symptom, the symptom can evade notice for a while. When nobody's attention is on a disease, and the symptoms are chronic, the symptoms become invisible.
Caveat: this is not my field, and I do not study it. An epidemiologist could likely present a more accurate picture.
my doctor and I had a recent discussion about exactly this. Just incredibly bizarre behavior from people with no explanation. I asked if it could be caused by parasites. She brought up a study in LA where they tested the homeless for Babesia, and many people tested positive. Sorry I did not get the link for this study, but it is plausible. I'm not even sure how we can as a society even address this. One of the treatments is now so politically polarized during the pandemic, even mentioning it out loud is a conversation killer.
also curious; nothing on this page looks controversial (https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/babesiosis/health_professional...), unless you believe that doctors are wrongly overprescribing azithromycin. (which is fair! but probably not conversation-killingly controversial)
Chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine would be the other likely candidates. A quick web search suggests they've been tested and found ineffective for Babesia. Of course, their being found ineffective for treating a disease in a scientific study does not always stop people from trying them.
There's a mouse study from 2019 suggesting ivermectin is likely to be effective against Babesia, but it is not a standard treatment as far as I can tell.
The article left me wondering, how many of these endemic pathogens are treatable? If they aren’t treatable, it makes sense for doctors not to routinely test for them. (Basic research to find new treatments is another matter.)
Many methodologies have unintentionally introduced bias, like the article mentions. Another example, ear infections are generally assumed to be caused by bacteria instead of viruses leading to prescription of antibiotics which may cause dysbiosis or antibiotic resistance leading to chronic ear infections and/or digestive issues. Why don’t clinicians test for viruses or parasites first to see if maybe that is weakening the immune system and leading to a bacterial overgrowth?
I am not talking about “I believe bubble up economics you believe trickle down so you’re crazy” kind of disagreements, I mean stuff like “lizard people from planet nibiru are eating the children of flat earth which is why the shadow government is injecting you with 5g to make you magnetic” kind of stuff.
I have watched several seemingly normal people go more and more crazy, and a pathogen (or maybe long Covid?) seems like a possible reason.
At least that’s what I tell myself.