Who Are You Calling Paranoid?

Submitted by tonyplant on July 8, 2006 - 15:03.

AADT has published a funny overview of the recent findings about the level of paranoia in the UK. They quote the BBC account of the statistics that paranoia is nearly as common as anxiety and depression and comment:

Their statistics paint a picture of a nation not quite teetering on the brink of tin foil hat sales and mass hysteria, but still facing an unexpectedly large problem.

I haven't read the original paper but AADT quotes:

• Over 40% of people regularly worry that negative comments are being made about them
• 27% think that people deliberately try to irritate them
• 20% worry about being observed or followed
• 10% think that someone has it in for them
• 5% worry that there is a conspiracy to harm them

I've no idea what the comparable figures are for other countries but it would be a fascinating comparison!

A while ago, Dr. Sanity’s offered a tongue-in-cheek account of command hallucinations. I rather blithely suggested that we need a Happystance to resist these strong command hallucinations and to provide us with personal and social resilience in the face of all the dire news that confronts us on a regular basis. As a consumer of media reporting, I sometimes feel that a lot of it implies that I am been governed by idiots who are incapable of concealing their disdain for me by covering up their attempts to deceive me on matters great and small. Possibly not a fair characterisation, but I'm not sure that media reporting is always a fair characterisation of the issues, people and stories.

Michael Crichton recently gave a lecture on Fear, Complexity, Environmental Management in the 21st Century. He gives a remarkable account of the mis-information surrounding the impact of Chernobyl. He summarises some of the statistics of estimated deaths and health-related problems and goes on to discuss how wrong they have proved to be. Crichton quotes a UN report from 2005 that says the largest public health problem created by the incident at Chernobyl is the:

damaging psychological impact [due] to a lack of accurate information…[manifesting] as negative self-assessments of health, belief in a shortened life expectancy, lack of initiative, and dependency on assistance from the state.

In Crichton’s opinion:

the greatest damage to the people of Chernobyl was caused by bad information. These people weren’t blighted by radiation so much as by terrifying but false information. We ought to ponder, for a minute, exactly what that implies. We demand strict controls on radiation because it is such a health hazard. But Chernobyl suggests that false information can be a health hazard as damaging as radiation. I am not saying radiation is not a threat. I am not saying Chernobyl was not a genuinely serious event.

But thousands of Ukrainians who didn’t die were made invalids out of fear. They were told to be afraid. They were told they were going to die when they weren’t. They were told their children would be deformed when they weren’t. They were told they couldn’t have children when they could. They were authoritatively promised a future of cancer, deformities, pain and decay. It’s no wonder they responded as they did.

It is easy to assign a demon role to the demands of television and the public’s desire for information. It’s incompatible with our social and intellectual values that there should be a draconian censorship policy that would restrict publication, broadcast and dissemination of speculation. We need public discussions of important issues and so we need access to views from interested parties. But there are times when I would like some of the assumptions and data underlying the speculation (which is sometimes presented as if it is fact) to be made more explicit.

Most of all, I would like some smart economist to write a book on The Moral Consequences of FEAR or The Economic Costs of Blighting Lives Through Mis-information.

Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project

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