it is widely believed that environmental factors in modern society are giving people depressive symptoms -- ranging from low-mood to dysthymia to full clinical

it is widely believed that environmental factors in modern society are giving people depressive symptoms -- ranging from low-mood to dysthymia to full clinical depression. i am willing to speculate that the same may be true of psychosis. i'm not an expert or anything but what is true of depressive symptoms seems like it could be true of psychotic symptoms as well. many people may be suffering from very low-grade, subclinical psychotic symptoms, with a smaller number progressing to diagnosable mental illness. this idea is consonant with findings that schizophrenia diagnoses increase for people who live in cities, and with the social defeat hypothesis. it seems to me that this would explain the increase in the past few years in the particularly bizarre kind of conspiratorial thinking described here. old-fashioned conspiracies (JFK, UFOs) had a kind of internal coherence and logic that seems to have gone away -- if you look at conspiracy stuff nowadays, conspiracy theorists don't even try to make sense any more. it's a style of thinking that really seems like it must the result of some kind of difference in mental processes.