Followup on Paranoid Friend
From: campbell@ufomind.com (Glenn Campbell, Las Vegas)
Date: Sat, 13 Sep 1997 10:07:30 -0800
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Date: Fri, 12 Sep 1997 23:05:57 -0800
From: [withheld by request]
To: campbell@ufomind.com
Subject: a letter for psychospy
Dear Glenn,
It has been a two years since we exchanged e-mail about paranoia. I am
the woman with the paranoid UFO-involved friend whose correspondence you
placed on your web site at
http://www.ufomind.com/campbell/paranoid/trojan.txt .
On a whim, because things have changed so much with my friend, it
occurred to me to go to those pages and re-read them. How grim things
looked for him then -- and how worried we were, especially because he
refused therapy at the time.
Well, here is a follow-up, and it is a happy on: I kept on asking
qestions of my friend and eventually -- after a year and a half -- hit
upon the diagnosis he was trying to hide from all of us: Obsessive
Compulsive Disorder.
What he was going through was not a UFO conspiracy-theory paranoia at
all, but an obsessive fear that took the form of worrying about his own
irrational thought processes. At times he fastened upon "thinking about
UFOs" as the presumed cause of his loss of control over his own thoughts
-- and that led me astray, because it seemed to me that UFO ideation was
the root of his problem.
However, UFOs were really the tip of the iceberg. A more deeply hidden
obsessive fear that he would commit suicide lay beneath the UFO
material.
I asked him about how often he thought of suicide. The answer was
shocking -- "every day...all day...for about...uh...forty years." It was
obvious then that the problem was neither paranoia nor depression, but
rather obsessional, recursive ideation. He had OCD of the type sometimes
referred to as "pure O," wherein there are few or no compulsions or
ritualizations, merely obsessional thoughts.
Once he admited that there were problems with his thinking, the path out
of the swamp was swift. I researched OCD for him and sent him reams of
information gathered from the web. The recent material on the genetic
basis of OCD really rang a bell for him. His mother had it too, which
is what caused her to hoard papers -- and he revealed that several other
people in his family had similar problems. When he understood that the
basis of his suffering was a biochemical glitch that caused recursive
negative thoughts and that the CONTENT of the thoughts was not the cause
of the recursivity, he began treatment with a selective serotonin
re-uptake inhibitor drug. He is doing fine now. He is essentially the
person he was before the breakdown.
I just thought you might like to know.
By the way, there have been numerous posts in the newsgroup
alt.support.ocd in which other people with this brain chemical disorder
have revealed that a fear of UFOs is one of their obsessions. This
specific obsession is not as common as obsessions with disease or death,
but it is about as common as the fear of hitting someone by accident
with one's car and it seems to be more common than the fear of losing
control of one's bowels in public.
In my opinion -- and the opinion of many people with OCD -- the content
of the obsessions is essentially meaningless. I suspect that people with
OCD pick up their obsession from events going on in their vicinity
(including the media and the nightly news). In short, there is nothing
intrinsically OCD-provoking about UFOs, but a significant percentage of
OCD folks do at one time or another obsess about UFOs because UFOs are
part of our popular culture mythology.
Index: Paranoid News
Created: Sep 13, 1997
