Hi there. I have a question that is meant to be more nuanced than your typical am I crazy/ am I not question… How do people reconcile being clinically paranoid in a world where we ARE being watched and recorded so often?
It feels a little ironic, maybe that’s the wrong term, but it’s really something to be a schizophrenic in a world with so much surveillance. It’s not so black and white as to what it means to be paranoid. I can’t reassure myself the way I might have in decades past that I’m not being watched, because so often I am by way of even cameras on transit and stores, etc, not to mention online.
Curious as to how you navigate this quandary of modern day schizophrenia. I am stable and live a good life, but this bothers me a great deal, tho I manage.
Sometimes I wonder if my delusions of being watched by the government was actually real in real life. So I guess try to keep distinguished reality and not reality
I’ve come to the conclusion that I am not important enough to be surveilled by the government. I do have an ongoing delusion about artificial intelligence and that in the future people will be able to see what we were doing. Also aliens… anyway, it is just a delusion. Nobody is watching us. Maybe it stems from a delusion of grandeur?
That is the same outlook I have about surveillance. There should be no reason why a schizophrenic should be monitored because we are mostly known for being delusional, hallucinating or paranoid.
Name one famous or well-known schizophrenic that has been surveillanced by the government. No one except for John Nash in the movie, “A Beautiful Mind”.
Thank you for responding. People have different attitudes and coping methods to this issue, and it’s no different for schizophrenics, I guess.
Myself, I have to practice not giving it too much power to bother me and have to decide to live my life in spite of the intrusion, just like most people I guess. I go for a bit of denial, but it doesn’t entirely work no matter how much I want it to.
But the effects of surveillance are more complicated when you have schizophrenia, isn’t It? We’re supposed to recover from delusions about being watched while still being frequently recorded in various ways in everyday life, and talking to professionals who take notes and discuss intimate details of our lives with each other then enter our information into health care databases.
It’s a bit of a strange and sad situation. It’s probably the worst possible outcome for a paranoid person that I can think of. It’s a bit crazy, if I dare say so.
Some people say it shouldn’t bother you if you have nothing to hide, but that doesn’t pan out either. There are things we all do that we prefer privacy for the sake of dignity and intimacy that are completely banal and 100% legal. Everyone needs privacy at times and it’s harder to come by these days.
I think it’s easy to internalize the sense of being watched, even for people without clinical paranoia. I get so used to being recorded that I begin to feel that I always am. I think George Orwell talked about that phenomenon, how eventually we start to sensor ourselves all the time when we are frequently surveilled.
It’s not a matter of being important or singled out or having delusions. I’m talking about the stuff that’s happening to everyone all the time.
Sorry if I went on and on. No one will hear me out about this. Most people don’t want to think about it, schizophrenic or not, and I thought that it might help someone else who wrestles with this.