A Downward Spiral?: Combating Paranoia

This cri de coeur appeared on the front page of the Sun, Britain’s top-selling newspaper, on 21 January 2008. The previous week had seen the conviction of the killers of 47-year-old Garry Newlove. Late on the night of 10 August 2007, Newlove had heard noises outside his home in Warrington, a Lancashire town previously best-remembered for being the unlikely target of two IRA bombs in 1993. He confronted a gang of drunken teenagers, who promptly punched and kicked him to death. The outraged lament on the Sun’s front page was in fact quoted from a letter to the paper from one Dr Stuart Newton, a former head teacher. And forming a melancholy border around his words were the faces of fifteen high-profile murder victims. The message was unmistakable, conveyed with the newspaper’s usual clarity: the country is going to the dogs; the streets are not safe for respectable folk to walk; our youth is out of control. ‘In parts of our country there is social breakdown. Society stops at the front door of our house and the streets have been lost and we’ve got to reclaim them’, agreed Conservative Party leader David Cameron. And the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, confessed that she felt uncomfortable walking in London after dark (her words, explained an official, ‘hadn’t come out as she had intended’ and, by way of proof, Ms Smith had recently gone so far as to purchase a kebab on the inner-city streets of Peckham). But where, you might wonder, is the news in all this? The reference to ‘feral youths’ is distinctively contemporary (rampaging teenagers being, as it were, one of the foul flavours of our day). But has there ever been a time when newspapers—and perhaps indeed the rest of us too—haven’t been decrying the ‘downward spiral of Britain’? The fact that one of the faces staring out from the Sun’s front page is that of Stephen Lawrence, stabbed to death in a racist attack in south London in April 1993—fifteen years ago—can be read as a discreet allusion to the timelessness of this nostalgia for a better, safer world.

Introduction: Or, Why Fat is a Paranoid Issue

Over the past few years, a new and deadly epidemic has stalked the land. Britain and the US, just like much of the rest of the world, are getting fat. Around 60 per cent of adults in the UK are heavier than they should be. It’s a similar story in the US, where two-thirds of adults are overweight or extremely overweight (obese). That’s a pretty shocking statistic, but we all know that keeping in shape when you’re trying to balance the demands of work and family life is tough. Who’s got time to get to the gym? Who has the energy to do more than heat up a ready meal after ten hours in the office? Besides, we all get bigger as we get older, don’t we? It’s a metabolism thing—isn’t it? But if you think the statistics for adults are alarming, wait till you find out how our kids are faring. In 2003, 27 per cent of children under 11 in England were either overweight or obese. In the US, where different methods to measure obesity are used, nearly 20 per cent of children aged 6 to 11 were classified as overweight or obese in 2004. The numbers have almost doubled in a decade. How did so many children get to be overweight before they’ve even reached the ripe old age of 11? How do you become overweight when so much of your day is taken up with charging round a playground or park, when you can’t drive, and when you’re not free—like the rest of us—to stuff your face at will with chocolate, crisps, and alcohol? The answer, of course, is a complex one. If adults are eating much less healthily than they used to, so are their kids. Instead of spending their evenings playing outside, children now have the delights of multi-channel television, computer games, and the Internet to choose from. And then there’s the fact that increasing numbers of us just won’t let our children outside on their own. Back in the mid 1970s, we were 6 years old.

‘They Tell You Lies’: Is Paranoia Increasing?

On the evening of 15 February 1996, the 147,000 tonne tanker Sea Empress ran aground on rocks at the entrance to Milford Haven harbour in south-west Wales. (The ship’s pilot, it later emerged, had been making his first ever solo attempt at the manoeuvre.) Over the next week, 72,000 tonnes of crude oil and 360 tonnes of heavy fuel oil seeped from the wreck into the sea, contaminating 200 kilometres of the Welsh coastline, much of it part of the exceptionally beautiful and ecologically diverse Pembrokeshire Coast National Park. More than 50,000 birds were killed or injured. The devastating effects of the Sea Empress disaster weren’t confined, however, to the flora and fauna of the National Park. In the wake of the oil spill, local people found themselves experiencing a range of health problems, including headaches, nausea, and skin irritation. And yet when we look closely at these accounts, something curious emerges. The first symptoms were reported as early as the first day of the incident. But at that stage very little oil had escaped from the wrecked tanker. Whatever was causing these first headaches and feelings of nausea, it wasn’t the Sea Empress. Indeed, people living on stretches of the coast that were entirely unaffected by the spill also complained of symptoms. How do we explain physical symptoms without an obvious physical cause? In the case of the Sea Empress disaster, it’s likely that they were the direct result of anxiety. It’s an established formula. Take one catastrophe, add extensive media coverage, and watch public anxiety grow. Think back, for example, to the anthrax scares that swept the US in September and October 2001. During these weeks, letters containing anthrax spores were sent to a number of senators and media organizations. Five people died and a further seventeen were also infected. (To date, the case is still unsolved.) With anxiety in the US already ratcheted to unprecedented levels by the September 11 attacks, hundreds of people soon began reporting that they too had been the victims of anthrax poisoning, with many complaining of symptoms.

A Nest of Traitors!: What is Paranoia?

November 5, 1611. London. At the court of James I, the king and his entourage settle down to enjoy the latest play by celebrated playwright William Shakespeare. The play in question is The Winter’s Tale, one of the clutch of so-called romances—along with Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Tempest—Shakespeare wrote before retiring back to Stratford, where he died in April 1616. Like Shakespeare’s other late plays, The Winter’s Tale offers a startling mixture of styles, oscillating wildly between pastoral comedy and intense psychological drama. It also includes a harrowing portrayal of extreme paranoia. Not that this could be guessed from the gentle opening of the play. Leontes, king of Sicily, is entertaining his childhood friend Polixenes, king of Bohemia. But having been away from home for nine months, Polixenes is anxious to return to Bohemia. Leontes pleads with him to stay, but Polixenes’ mind is made up. Or at least it is until Leontes asks his wife, Hermione, to speak to him. And though we might assume that Leontes will be overjoyed by Polixenes’ change of heart, what we see next couldn’t be more unexpected. Polixenes’ decision plunges Leontes into a savage spiral of paranoia. How was Hermione able to persuade his lifelong friend to stay in Sicily when his own efforts were futile? That’s simple: Hermione and Polixenes are lovers. Polixenes is the father of Hermione’s unborn child. And everyone except Leontes knows it: . . . They’re here with me already; whispering, rounding ‘Sicilia is a so-forth’ Tis far gone When I shall gust it last. . . . What starts off resembling a bizarre attack of jealousy soon develops into much more. Suddenly, and without a shred of evidence, Leontes suspects everyone of plotting against him—including his faithful subject Camillo, whose only crime is the attempt to defend Hermione: . . . What starts off resembling a bizarre attack of jealousy soon develops into much more. Suddenly, and without a shred of evidence, Leontes suspects everyone of plotting against him—including his faithful subject Camillo, whose only crime is the attempt to defend Hermione: . . .

Conclusion: Or, Enjoy the Fruit

October 1, 2007 and London is in the grip of another terrorism alert. Shoppers in Soho are sparked into panic by a strange noxious-smelling cloud. Suspecting the capital is under chemical attack, the emergency services cordon off roads and evacuate the area. Meanwhile, firefighters wearing breathing apparatus begin a three-hour search for the source of the stench. This eventually turns out to be the Thai Cottage restaurant where, until he’d been asked to leave his kitchen, chef Chalemchai Tangjariyapoon had been midway through preparing a batch of nam prik pao. ‘We only cook it once a year—it’s a spicy dip with extra hot chillies that are deliberately burned’, he said later. ‘To us it smells like burned chilli and it is slightly unusual. I can understand why people who weren’t Thai would not know what it was but it doesn’t smell like chemicals. I’m a bit confused. ...When we came back at 7.30 p.m. we saw the door had been smashed and there were fire brigade and police waiting outside. I was a bit scared but they were very nice about it.’ Should you wish to have a go at making the abovementioned Thai dip, you will need charred chillies, garlic flakes, dried shrimps, palm sugar, shrimp paste, tamarind, and vegetable oil. But then again, given Mr Tangjariyapoon’s experience, you might prefer to let the experts handle it. Provided they still dare. Because, as the staff of the Thai Cottage know only too well, right now we’re more than a little jumpy. Threats seem to loom at us from all quarters. And of course sometimes it’s right to be cautious. Lurking within the kitchen of the Thai Cottage was nothing more sinister than a superspicy savoury dip, but Londoners are well aware of the havoc terrorists can wreak. Muggers, vandals, delinquent teenagers, paedophiles, rapists, corrupt officials, malicious colleagues, gossips, spies, and blackmailers—none of these are entirely the figment of our fevered imaginations. The trick, of course, is to keep a sense of perspective, recognizing that these kinds of dangers are rare and taking that on into a calm and measured assessment of risk.

Doing the Camberwell Walk: Paranoia and Reasoning

Welcome to Camberwell, home of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London. In many ways Camberwell is typical of inner-city London: built-up, busy, and ethnically very diverse. It’s also an area of considerable poverty. In the 2004 Index of Multiple Deprivation—a government-sponsored survey of living standards across England—Camberwell was ranked at 6,327 out of 32,482. This sounds alright until you know that the most deprived area is ranked number 1 and the least deprived number 32,482. (Parts of the Anfield area of inner-city north Liverpool were officially deemed the most deprived place in England in 2004; the village of Oakley in rural Hampshire took place number 32,482.) Pictured opposite is the area’s main shopping street. Follow it far enough and it’ll lead you to the Thames, but the wide expanse of the river seems a very long way from the run-down, traffic-clogged, and people-thronged streets of Camberwell. What effect—if any—does an urban environment like this have on paranoia? To find out, we asked fifteen volunteers with strongly paranoid thoughts to walk down the Camberwell Road from the Institute, buy a newspaper, and come back. Afterwards they were given a range of psychological tests. Finally, their test scores were compared to those of fifteen other people, again all with pronounced paranoia, who’d simply stayed at the Institute listening to a relaxation tape. Did making the trip down the Camberwell Road increase the volunteers’ level of paranoia? Absolutely. And given the stressful nature of the environment that didn’t come as a surprise. (As we saw in Chapter 3, there’s a well-established link between stress, particularly in urban environments, and mental illness.) More intriguing though were the results of one particular psychological test: the beads task. In the beads task, participants are presented with two glass jars. One contains 85 orange beads and 15 black beads; the other contains 85 black and 15 orange. The beads have been mixed up in the jars. The researcher conducting the test chooses one of the jars (without telling the participant), and moves them both out of view.

Anxiety, Avatars, and Ink Spots: Paranoia and Emotions

What causes paranoia? That’s a tough question to answer, and for at least a couple of reasons. For one thing, there’s no simple explanation. Paranoia, like so many psychological experiences, is the result of a complex interaction of numerous factors—as we’ll see over the course of the next three chapters. But there’s a bigger, more fundamental problem. How can we accurately and scientifically observe paranoid thinking? Paranoid thoughts don’t pop into our heads out of the blue. They’re generally our attempt to make sense of something we’ve experienced—perhaps a colleague ignored us at lunch or someone looked at us oddly on the bus. We can ask people about their paranoid thoughts, but how do we get at the truth of the situation? How do we even know for sure whether their thoughts are genuinely paranoid? Perhaps the colleague ignored us because our existing paranoia makes us reluctant to socialize. Or perhaps our fears are a legitimate response to a threatening situation. Maybe the guy on the bus really was looking for trouble. Any rigorous, scientific study of paranoia would need to expose a statistically significant number of people to exactly the same experience to see which of them reacted in a paranoid way. Once you had these data, you could start probing to see whether there was anything distinctive about the paranoid group. But how on earth can we arrange for hundreds of people to experience exactly the same everyday event in laboratory conditions? It’s impossible, right? Actually, there is a way, and it’s one we used in a groundbreaking recent experiment. That way is virtual reality. In the summer of 2006, we sent a leaflet to all households local to King’s College London. The leaflet announced a study of virtual reality at the college and invited people to participate. In the end we recruited 100 men and 100women of varying ages from 18 to 77, and from very diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. The mix, in fact, was pretty representative of the UK as a whole. We didn’t tell the volunteers that we were researching into paranoia until we’d completed the experiment.

‘I Don’t Want to Sweep Alone’: Paranoia and Anomalous Experiences

Thus George Costanza, nebbish anti-hero of hit sitcom Seinfeld. George is desperate to know why his girlfriend Gwen has dumped him. (‘It’s not you—it’s me’ is her somewhat unhelpful—and utterly implausible—offering on the subject.) But all is not lost. Jerry, George’s best friend, has just started dating Laura, who is deaf. And what better way to discover what people are saying about you than have a friend read their lips? It’s a scheme that appeals to the paranoid in all of us. As George tells Jerry: ‘If we could just harness this power and use it for our own personal gain there’d be no stopping us.’ Well, Laura does indeed lip-read Gwen’s conversation with Todd, the host of the party, and she duly provides George with a running commentary in sign language. So far, so good. But George doesn’t understand sign language; it has to be translated for him by ‘hipster doofus’ Kramer: . . . KRAMER ‘Hi Gwen, hi tide.’ JERRY Hi tide? KRAMER Hi Todd. ‘You’ve got something between your teeth.’ GEORGE What? KRAMER No that’s what he said. That’s interesting. ‘I love carrots, but I hate carrot soup. And I hate peas, but I love pea soup.’ So do I. GWEN I don’t envy you, Todd. The place is going to be a mess. TODD Maybe you can stick around after everybody leaves and we can sweep together. KRAMER ‘Why don’t you stick around and we can sleep together.’ GEORGE What?!? KRAMER ‘You want me to sleep with you?’ TODD I don’t want to sweep alone. KRAMER He says ‘I don’t want to sleep alone.’ She says, oh boy, ‘love to.’ . . . You can guess the rest. This sad tale points up a crucial element in paranoia. Because, although by definition paranoid thoughts are unjustified and exaggerated, they aren’t completely irrational. Life is full of confusing or unsettling experiences and paranoid thoughts supply an explanation (albeit not an especially useful or accurate one) for these ambiguous experiences. They are acts of interpretation gone awry.