My Computer Has Eyes

The Internet has long been a playground for deluded sociopaths. This is why the wise among us roundly deny Myspace.com friend requests from strangers, why paranoid parents install content filters on their children's computers, and why I just trashed an email with the subject heading "Will you be my foreign business associate?"

We all know that, like the actual world, the digital world can be the "site" of plenty of dubious activity. There are no spatial limitations, nor standardized restrictions of content, to impede your standard misinformed lunatic from carving out their own hazardous section of the cybersphere. In our habitual browsing, we are never more than one accidental click away from some crazy bullshit: anyone who has ever experienced the dreaded feedback loop of pornographic pop-up windows knows what I'm talking about.

However, the reverse situation is rarely considered. Sure, anyone with twenty minutes of web-surfing under their belt is aware that crazy people pretty much run the internet, but few are aware that the widespread public availability of the internet has brought about significant changes in the nature of delusion in psychiatric patients. This is a recent phenomenon: the web isn't just an outlet for the deluded anymore, but also a cause of delusion.

A recent study in the psychiatric journal Psychopathology suggests that psychotic delusions increasingly concern the internet. By presenting a series of impressive case studies of patients who had deluded themselves into believing, for example, that websites contain a hidden "darker side" used by secret organizations, or that internet-controlled "beams of light" are capable of illegal surveillance, the study warns that cultural issues and media can influence delusional beliefs.

One woman profiled had become convinced that she was being personally targeted by the authorities because she had stumbled on an Al-Queda terrorist network while using a search engine to find information about an ingredient on a chewing gum package. Had she not had access to the internet, the study suggests, she may have formatted her paranoia differently; these technology-related delusions have become common as the habitual use of high-technology becomes standard.

Although "technology" delusions have been common in psychiatry since the 1970s -- it's very common for schizophrenic patients, for example, to project their paranoia onto television, radio, and other media -- internet-related delusions are relatively new. They were never reported until the internet began to be ubiquitous in cultural parlance and discussed frequently in national publications, suggesting, this study says, "that a level of cultural salience (or perhaps social concern) has to be achieved before such a concept can become incorporated into paranoid or psychotic experiences."

Of course, cultural salience does not clear understanding make; in fact, few people seem to actually know or care how the internet works. The great Arthur C. Clarke famously noted that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," especially for those who do not understand it. The mentally ill have long experienced or blamed the presence of hostile "magical" forces for their psychosis; Clarke's citation usefully implies that high-technology -- in this case, the internet -- can emulate the role of the magical in psychotic delusion.

It's not surprising, then, that an effective treatment of internet-related delusion is, simply, education. For patients who believe the internet operates through energy, secret governmental mechanisms, or beams of light, a little concentrated study about the history of the internet goes a long way. When a therapist used a popular book about the world wide web to educate him, one 19 year old schizophrenic patient cited in the Psychopathology article reduced his certainty that the internet was somehow related to his persecution to zero. Technology-related delusions can more easily be tested against reality, and in this case the source of and the solution to the problem came from the same place. Perhaps we can all learn from this.

Among other things, the existence of web-based psychological disorder somewhat humanizes the internet, signaling that it has been around long enough to have irreversibly wheedled its way into the human consciousness. No longer an upstart technology understood by a relative few, the internet is now a pervasive enough form that even people prone to psychotic episode are aware of it. The web is here to stay. Further, this manmade maelstrom of information has snowballed into something strong enough to have an adverse effect on the very people that created it, a model of growth which we must absolutely remain aware of as we launch headlong into a rapidly developing digital culture.