Psychosis or Hypnotic Suggestibility in Micro-targeted Terrorism?
Exploring the hypnotic suggestibility of dissociative disorders and psychosis.
An article was brought to my attention that only 5% of mass shootings involve mental health issues and that I might be incorrect about psychosis and micro-targeted terrorism. I am not one of those people willing to sacrifice accuracy in order to portray myself as being “right.” I also don’t want to stigmatize mental health conditions.
So, I decided to dive in an explore the mechanisms and other factors involved that makes people susceptible to micro-targeted terrorism.
Mass Shootings: Microtargeted Terrorism (dividedconquered.substack.com)
I was sent the article below and there are some limitations in this paper.
Is There a Link Between Mental Health and Mass Shootings? | Columbia University Department of Psychiatry (columbiapsychiatry.org)
Are people with mental health disorders more likely to commit mass shootings or mass murder?
The public tends to link serious mental illnesses, like schizophrenia or psychotic disorders, with violence and mass shootings. But serious mental illness—specifically psychosis—is not a key factor in most mass shootings or other types of mass murder. Approximately 5% of mass shootings are related to severe mental illness. And although a much larger number of mass shootings (about 25%) are associated with non-psychotic psychiatric or neurological illnesses, including depression, and an estimated 23% with substance use, in most cases these conditions are incidental.
The vast amount of “mass shootings” (any shooting that involves 3 or more people) are domestic violence and gang related gun violence… not school shootings or terrorism.
I read the actual paper cited in the article and linked it below. I highlighted the data included in the study.
Psychotic symptoms in mass shootings v. mass murders not involving firearms: findings from the Columbia mass murder database - Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, New York State Psychiatric Institute
Mass murders stemming from family matters is different than walking into a mall to kill a bunch of random strangers. This is a serious limitation of this study.
So, how does psychosis or suggestibility affect school shootings, terrorism, or send a message via hybrid warfare?
If the 2022 paper on Social Media and Schizophrenia was correct about manipulating and exacerbating psychosis, then it seems the small fraction of mass shootings that are related to terrorism actually line up with the small fraction of mass shootings perpetrated due to mental health. More studies would need to be done to confirm my hypothesis.
* There’s also the issue of undiagnosed disorders in some of these mass shootings.
The study below shows that hypnotic suggestibility can be measured online. So, if a study can test for high suggestibility, then so too can hostile foreign nations on social media.
Can hypnotic suggestibility be measured online? - PMC (nih.gov)
The results revealed that the difference between offline and online groups was small to negligible in all aspects and, importantly, applying online rather than offline screening is unlikely to reduce the composite screening score by more than 1.22 and the objective score by more than 1.36 out of ten… Introducing online hypnosis screening would markedly decrease the amount of time experimenters need to invest to find participants for their studies.
So, what are the high suggestibility factors?
Hypnotic susceptibility measures how easily a person can be hypnotized.
Susceptibility
Individuals of extremely high hypnotizability tend to have distinctive characteristics outside of hypnosis. In 1981, Sherl Wilson and T X Barber reported that most of a group of extremely high hypnotizables who they termed "fantasizers". The fantasizers exhibited a cluster of traits consisting of:
1) fantasizing much of the time,
2) reporting their imagery was as vivid as real perceptions,
3) having physical responses to their imagery,
4) having an earlier than average age for first childhood memory,
5) recalling "imaginary playmates" from childhood, and
6) having grown up with parents who encouraged imaginative play.[6]
In 1991, Deirdre Barrett examined a larger group of extremely high hypnotizables and confirmed that about 60% fit Barber and Wilson's characterization of fantasizers while 40% were what she termed "dissociaters" who:
1) experienced daydreaming mostly as "spacing out" and not remembering what had been going on for periods of time,
2) had later than average ages for first memories, and
3) had parents who had been harshly punitive and/or who had experienced other childhood traumas. Fantasizers tended to experience hypnosis as being much like other imaginative activities while dissociaters reported it was unlike anything they'd ever experienced.[7]
Individuals with dissociative identity disorder have the highest hypnotizability of any clinical group, followed by those with post-traumatic stress disorder.[8][9][10] Research has found that transcranial magnetic brain stimulation can enhance hypnotizability.[11]
It seems it is not an accident that a vulnerable population that is highly suggestible is being targeted online by foreign adversaries. There needs to be greater protections online and better awareness.
Hypnotic suggestibility in dissociative and related disorders: A meta-analysis - ScienceDirect
It’s important not to stigmatize dissociative disorder patients, but those patients and their loved ones should be aware of the risks of them being a target online. Just because you don’t have this disorder doesn’t mean you’re not susceptible to online hypnotic suggestibility.
Make sure to spend plenty of time offline with loved ones and check in with people spending a lot of time alone.
D.C.