???? I’m so confused about what happened here. The aliens part (as stated) isn’t a red flag for me, but the Kant thing seem transparently crazy to me. I have to imagine there’s something being lost in translation here, and missing context for why people didn’t immediately see that this person was having a mental breakdown?
FWIW, my own experience is that people often miss fairly blatant psychotic episodes; so I’m not sure how Leverage-specific the explanation needs to be for this one. For example, once I came to believe that an acquaintance was having a psychotic episode and suggested he see a psychiatrist; the psychiatrist agreed. A friend who’d observed most of the same data I had asked me how I’d known. I said it was several things, but that the bit where our acquaintance said God was talking to him through his cereal box was one of the tip-offs from my POV. My friend’s response was “oh, I thought that was a metaphor.” I know several different stories like this one, including a later instance where I was among those who missed what in hindsight was fairly blatant evidence that someone was psychotic, none of which involved weird group-level beliefs or practices.
I’d guess that the people in question had a mostly normal air to them during the episode, just starting to say weird things?
Most people’s conception of a psychotic episode probably involves a sense of the person acting like a stereotypical obviously crazy person on the street. Whereas if it’s someone they already know and trust, just acting slightly more eccentric than normal, people seem likely to filter everything the person says through a lens of “my friend’s not crazy so if they do sound crazy, it’s probably a metaphor or else I’m misunderstanding what they’re trying to say”.
FWIW, my own experience is that people often miss fairly blatant psychotic episodes; so I’m not sure how Leverage-specific the explanation needs to be for this one. For example, once I came to believe that an acquaintance was having a psychotic episode and suggested he see a psychiatrist; the psychiatrist agreed. A friend who’d observed most of the same data I had asked me how I’d known. I said it was several things, but that the bit where our acquaintance said God was talking to him through his cereal box was one of the tip-offs from my POV. My friend’s response was “oh, I thought that was a metaphor.” I know several different stories like this one, including a later instance where I was among those who missed what in hindsight was fairly blatant evidence that someone was psychotic, none of which involved weird group-level beliefs or practices.
I’d guess that the people in question had a mostly normal air to them during the episode, just starting to say weird things?
Most people’s conception of a psychotic episode probably involves a sense of the person acting like a stereotypical obviously crazy person on the street. Whereas if it’s someone they already know and trust, just acting slightly more eccentric than normal, people seem likely to filter everything the person says through a lens of “my friend’s not crazy so if they do sound crazy, it’s probably a metaphor or else I’m misunderstanding what they’re trying to say”.
Yes.