Charles Mackay’s classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds touches on bizarre beliefs shared by relatively large numbers of people. Then there are the psychoses shared on a smaller scale - the folie à deux, a syndrome where delusional beliefs may be shared with another person – or, more generally, the folie à plusieurs, known to DSM as the shared psychotic disorder. (A startling example of the folie à deux is that of the twins Ursula and Sabina Eriksson who, among other things, deliberately and repeatedly hurled themselves in front of motorway traffic - goo.gl/VZu6x ) Perhaps folies à plusieurs are the stuff of our everyday lives. Perhaps we ought to expect to find our families and our workplaces relying upon a penchant for shared delusions and our willingness to maintain implausible fictions. Soon after youve left a long-held job, say, the daily urgencies seem very like a strange psychotic episode, and the hierarchies, demands and necessities of what was just a short time ago so terribly important suddenly vanish – not *only* because you’re no longer working at that particular job but because the delusion that that job and that company were so very vital and important is no longer being shared.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 23:41:34 +0000
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