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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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Okay let's start with schizophrenia. Well known disease, somewhat understood etiology and biological mechanisms. Makes people believe weird shit, be psychotic. Relatively easy.

Then gets harder. Schizotypal personality disorder. Weird people....with magical thinking? Makes people believe weird shit. Maybe look kinda psychotic but not actually be psychotic? Might have schizophrenia as a complication. Okay that's kinda complicated. People in military have it? Well no probably not, it would be hard to get through basic but maybe?

What if it seems more personality driven - are SJWs psychotic? Religious people? Some people will say they are absolutely untethered from reality and psychotic and believing weird shit. Plenty people will say "no this is the state of the world."

Okay then so what if you are traumatized, you are looking for answers or your world view is knocked over. You try and fill it with something and find something online. Pizzagate, SJ, UAPs, whatever.

Maybe then you're kinda psychotic (well....a little delusional) but you don't have hallucinations or negative symptoms. Now other people think you have weird beliefs (but others don't!).

Or you end up with straight up schizophrenia or some other psychotic disorder because of stress/trauma or resulting substance abuse.

Special forces guys get pretty intense psychological assessments when they join and periodically during their service. So presumably he didn’t have any really obvious psychosis disorders in his youth or during his service.

Schizophrenia and other typical psychotic disorders most commonly manifest in young adulthood but can occur later randomly or because of some medical or substance induced insult - or acute stress.

True psychosis doesn't need to be the cause here - consider born again Christian or woke/anti-woke converts. Can have really really strongly held beliefs that others may feel are not reality based.

A veteran can also seek solace from their experiences and trauma and end up with odd or way too strongly anchored beliefs, even without something that meets formal diagnostic criteria.

Guy may have met criteria for major depression with psychotic features but based off the information available so far he doesn't really "look" like that.