[Dion]

The surprising link between conspiracy theories and mental health

If you’ve suffered with a mental illness for long enough, chances are that at some point, you’ll begin to recognise patterns to your health.

When I am well, I am enthusiastic about the world. I like the world. I like myself.

When I’m not, I want to know everything there is to know about Chemtrails. The suspicious death of Kurt Cobain. I fear my extensive knowledge of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 would not be a hit at parties, even if I felt well enough to attend them.

Over twenty-plus years of zigzagging between relative happiness and obsessively Googling “why did the third tower collapse?,” I’ve come to wonder whether there’s a link between the two states of mind.

In recent years it’s been suggested that stress plays its part in leading people to fringe beliefs, too. Professor Viren Swami, from Anglia Ruskin University, performed studies in 2016 that took 400 participants between 20 and 78 and asked whether they believed the 1969 moon landings had been faked.

Professor Swami also polled subjects as to whether they believed that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated by the American government. He then assessed subjects’ stress levels—most significantly, stressful situations that might have occurred within their lives in the last six months.

The results showed that the more stressed a person was, the more likely they were to believe in conspiracy.

“Stressful situations increase the tendency to think less analytically,” says Professor Swami. “An individual experiencing a stressful life event may begin to engage in a particular way of thinking, such as seeing patterns that don’t exist.”

“In the aftermath of distressing events,” he continued, “it is possible that some individuals may seek out conspiracist explanations that reinstall a sense of order or control.”

It’s fair to say that scientific studies establishing connectivity between mental health and belief in conspiracy is a developing field. More plentiful are a variety of surveys which seek to establish links between various social and psychological factors and a belief in conspiracy.

One of the most significant of these, reported by Psychology Today in April 2017, involved mining data from one of the largest surveys of mental health ever carried out: the US National Comorbidity Survey-Replication conducted between 2001 and 2003.

Subjects were asked the consider the statement; “I’m convinced there’s a conspiracy behind many things in the world.” More than a quarter of subjects believed that to be true.

Digging into the data, there were a number of commonalities. Those who agreed with that statement tended to be male, unmarried, with above-average levels of social disadvantages, such as having relatively low income and education levels. They were more likely to be from an ethnic minority.

They were more likely to carry a weapon. And they tended to report lower levels of physical and psychological wellbeing. Many had considered suicide.

Think of the mass murders committed by ‘Incels’ just this year—young, heterosexual men who through a combination of isolation and misanthropy believe their lack of sexual activity is in fact a conspiracy.

“[More] psychological models of conspiracy theories need testing” concludes Psychology Today. ”Indeed, we don’t know enough about conspiracy theories full stop. But given the current socio-political climate has this kind of research ever been more necessary?”

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/a...-mental-health