Sympathy for Psychosis
By Craig B. Garner
Founder
Garner Health Law Corporation
Original Publish Date: November 5, 2024
“So if you meet me, have some courtesy | Have some sympathy and some taste | Use all your well-learned politesse | Or I’ll lay your soul to waste.” -- Sir Michael Philip Jagger and Keith Richards
Group Crazy
Mass psychogenic illness (MPI) involves symptoms of widespread illness through a specific population without any responsible infectious agent. Also known as mass sociogenic illness, mass psychogenic disorder, epidemic hysteria or simply mass hysteria, this rapid onset of symptoms without any organic basis spread only by sight and sound puts the somatic in the psycho. Due to the subjective nature of this condition, MPI is to bioterrorism what Lazarus Syndrome is to resurrection.
Documented as early as the fifteenth century when nuns throughout western Europe began biting each other, MPI did not historically create a global risk as any purported instance of MPI remained minimal and localized, especially since transmission remains through the senses of sight and sound. Even the alleged loudest sound in recorded history (August 27, 1883 with the volcanic eruption on the Indonesian Island Krakatoa) sounded like artillery to the residents of Australia (2,000 miles away) and gunfire in Mauritius (3,000 miles away). During the four-hour journey for the sound to arrive in Mauritius (travelling at approximately 750 miles per hour), the Krakatoa volcano likely caused some chaos along the way. Nevertheless, there is no recorded event similar to the 1883 eruption, much less a repetitive, catastrophic noise.
Internet Crazy
At least until January 1, 1983, also commonly known as the birthday of the Internet. The World Wide Web, historically experienced by most through sight and sound, now includes in recent years the optional sense of touch. This miracle of technology renders commonplace the instantaneous communication between any number of individuals located just about anywhere on the Flat Earth. For those known as Generation Z or Generation Alpha, anything short of such communication is antiquated.
In 1687 Isaac Newton through his Third Law of Motion unwittingly predicted a problem with epic advances in technology, and a possible mechanism by which MPI can spread beyond geographic clusters and become a global pandemic. Due to MPI’s epicenter existing in the mind, the list of resulting possible physical symptoms remains infinite, something the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (“DSM-5”) is incapable of grasping. Said differently, the risk of global mass hysteria spread through the Internet is not only a realistic threat in the modern era, a world-wide outbreak of MPI could render traditional medicine as documented by the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, obsolete.
Enter The Singularity
Science and science fiction predict a similar event by the year 2045, and even popularized an accompanying name. The technological singularity, or commonly known as just the “singularity”, is the hypothetical point in time at which advances in artificial intelligence and related technology become both uncontrollable and irreversible, thereby shifting human evolution in epic and unimaginable ways. While aspects of the singularity may occur sooner and/or later, even the most prolific conspiracy theorist could never predict the landscape in a post-singularity society.
Ranging from the American media franchise created by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd to an enlightened utopia without a scintilla of dystopia, and everything else in between, further discussion about a theoretical transition from MPI to singularity remains unnecessary. In the context of mental illness and the impact of the Internet in 2024, however, MPI may go rogue.
The End of Health Care
Modern American health care is failing, although not for lack of advances in technology nor the Herculean efforts of brilliant practitioners before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Health care as it now exists is financially unsustainable, which over a long enough period of time should result in its demise. Likewise, for every instance when a patient is unable to access health care in its most advanced platform, this is also failure, at least with respect to the aspirations of this nation’s founding fathers: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Whether health care is a Constitutional right remains appropriate for debate, but a system that determines whether “we the People” live or die should exist far above the common privilege. Health care oftentimes effectuates results on the basis of race, religion, financial status and possibly every other cultural difference in society. This is unfortunate since historically diversification existed as a great source of national pride, so much that the nation’s leadership saw fit on October 28, 1886, to stick a 141 foot copper statute weighing in at 450,000 pounds in Upper New York Bay.
The federal mandate for hospitals in the United States to embrace tired, poor and huddled masses only exists in the event of a medical emergency or during active labor. While emergencies generally exist on a continuum, they typically exist within the subjective. As health care continues to distance itself from the objective, the missing bridge between mental health and medical/surgical care becomes less important. The greater challenge remains health care’s inability to treat mental illness both by DSM-5 listing as well as the expanding number of individuals who fall somewhere between “academic or educational problem” (ICD-10-CM, Z55.9 ) and “wandering associated with a mental disorder” (ICD-10-CM, Z91.83).
Curiously, neither the DSM-V or the DSM-IV defined MPI, although the DSM-V includes a new category, “somatic symptom and related disorders”, which includes somatic symptom disorder, illness anxiety disorder, conversion disorder, psychological factors affecting other medical conditions, factitious disorder, other specified somatic symptom and related disorder, and unspecified somatic symptom and related disorder. The commonality between these conditions is “the prominence of somatic symptoms associated with significant distress and impairment.”
Blame CAPTCHA, Blame TikTok
According to sources on the Internet, CAPTCHAs have an 8% failure rate, which increases to 29% if case sensitive. According to another source on the Internet, the Mandela Effect is responsible for the increasing inability of individuals to identify common objects, such as motorcycles, buses, crosswalks and fire hydrants. While false memory syndrome is not listed as a psychiatric illness in the DSM-V, a recent Internet study has speculated that there is a correlation between the increasing CAPCHA failures and the rise in individuals suffering from anxiety disorders.
CAPCHA, however, is only the beginning. As a result of information disseminated on the Internet, there exists widespread disagreement over many important events in modern history. The online rabbit holes are infinite, but human life is sacred and fragile. Until such time as the singularity does occur, our collective psycho may improve upon our collective soma by spending less time with techno. Sadly, the concurrent keystrokes of “control” and “z” do not work on a global level, and society cannot undo the damage caused by the Internet. Society can, however, recognize imperfections within the World Wide Web, and the ways in which it has eviscerated the foundation of knowledge society once held. While the misinformation which exists online is less dramatic than a documented occurrence of MPI, the line between the two becomes blurred once a certain percentage of the population believes the misinformation, or at least no longer believes what once existed in the archives of truth.
Social media poses an even greater threat to children and teens. In October 2024, eleven states filed lawsuits against TikTok in an effort to reduce and/or eliminate the alleged risk TikTok may pose on the nation’s youth. In one complaint filed by the State of New York, 36% of the U.S. teens admit to using social media “too much,” while more than half admit that foregoing the social media platform altogether would be “somewhat” or “very” hard. According to the complaint, TikTok through a smartphone device has become the heroin within the syringe. Once a viewer crosses that invisible line, the viewer may never be able to return home.
The mind is incredibly powerful, and medical science struggles to understand its true impact on the body, not to mention the stress, anxiety and depression which follows an inability to hold a firm grasp on reality. Doom and gloom, however, are not the inevitable fate for humanity, and solutions do exist beyond the singularity. For so many the Internet has evolved into the functional equivalent of a prison. Perhaps to find relief from our virtual reality, technology holds the keys as well. The cross-roads at which medicine and magic meet may not provide multiple directions much longer, although it remains unknown if the resulting evolutionary shift will precede extinction or an epic existential crisis. Such an event will test society’s collective faith as well as the planet’s Firmament while remaining an accepted exclusion within a qualified health plan.
Craig Garner is the founder of Garner Health Law Corporation, as well as a healthcare consultant specializing in issues pertaining to modern American healthcare. Craig is also an adjunct professor of law at Pepperdine University School of Law. He can be reached at craig@garnerhealth.com.