...Just a friendly reminder here that these people are not technically mentally ill...
The more one learns about mental illness, the more it appears that most people are mentally ill at some point in their life. It's just a matter of degrees.
The fundamental question one has to ask is, "Are we all in the same perception of reality and can we agree on a common set of facts?".
If you read the last couple of paragraphs of Alistair's post, he's giving his understanding of reality to his co-worker and trying to get her to agree on a common set of facts. It didn't work. She's living in a different reality and not only operating with a different set of "facts", she's aggressively rejecting any attempts to be in the same reality as the rest of us.
That's mental illness. And one thing that people who are studying QAnon are finding in their research:
many of them have a history of diagnosed mental illness:
In court records of QAnon followers arrested in the wake of the Capitol insurrection, 68% reported they had received mental health diagnoses. The conditions they revealed included post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, paranoid schizophrenia and Munchausen syndrome by proxy – a psychological disorder that causes one to invent or inflict health problems on a loved one, usually a child, in order to gain attention for themselves. By contrast, 19% of all Americans have a mental health diagnosis.
Among QAnon insurrectionists with criminal records, 44% experienced a serious psychological trauma that preceded their radicalization, such as physical or sexual abuse of them or of their children.
No, they're just assholes!
Some are. Some aren't.
For years, we've had a stereotype of what a "mentally ill" person is. But when it's the neighbor who suffers a severe depression after a loss, or the family member who self-medicates with alcohol, of the self-destructive friend or the coworker who has some way-out-there religious beliefs, we normalize it instead of realizing that- even if it's temporary- it's mental illness.
What's different with these people who have bought into delusional beliefs about vaccines, the government, COVID-19 and- in complete denial of the 660,000 people who have died- insist it's all a hoax or a plot, is that they're spreading a disease that we have a vaccine to prevent. We need to stop dismissing them as assholes or as harmless members of society and start encouraging them to get help. Help can be encouraging them to delete social media accounts. Help can be getting them to talk with a therapist, their family doctor, a member of the clergy or a trusted friend... someone who can help them get back to the same reality and get their vaccine.
Perhaps if they had gotten help at some point prior to the pandemic (or the 2016 election for that matter), we wouldn't be where we are.
