Young Australian Skeptics

I press the buzzer.
“Yes?“
“I’d like to visit someone” I say into the microphone.
The door clicks and I push the door open, walking into an unknown world.
As I walk down the brightly lit hallway, I can’t help but notice that through the open doors I pass, there are adults on their beds, in awkward positions, with awkward expressions.
Approaching the reception desk, an area sectioned off by plastic windows, I can’t tell who are patients and who are visitors. One young man with an odd manor tells me to knock on the window. A nurse comes out of the adjacent room and hands him some pills with a little plastic cup of water.
I ask to see Jane*, and the nurse gives a muffled call for her over the loudspeaker.
I wait.
I look at the people around me. They walk slowly, with a sad but carefree expression on their face. This is their world, and they know it. The question is, do they know they are mentally ill?

Jane walks down the corridor and it is only when she spots me that her face brightens with wide eyes and toothy smile. We hug, and she immediately tells me how everyone here is nuts, how they all believe weird things, and are all very spiritual in different ways. Jane complains that because she humours everyone, people notice that she is changing her beliefs depending on who she talks to, and this makes them suspicious of her. It sounds reasonable to me, and I sympathise.

“Dahli, you know me and I know you, and because it’s me, you know me, I’m not crazy. I went off my medication and the police picked me up, and when I got here they put me in ICU for three days because I refused my medication… here, do you want a cuppa? It’s fake coffee because you know, so if you want to make it fake you just put in these little milks. Because it’s fake! … But I’m back on meds and I know I was crazy. I know how it works here, anyone who thinks they’re not crazy is crazy, so I’m admitting that I was crazy.”

And all I can see is Jane, my Jane, who seems to have drunk too much alcohol and is slurring her words a bit, her eyes a little too droopy, is repeating things a little too much, is speaking a little too frankly, a little too loud, and is claiming things there are a little too odd.

“I have an avatar. I know you won’t believe this because you’re a skeptic, but birds always come to me, see? Those pigeons. It’s because they know. Owls too. Birds and owls…”

I discovered something scientific and I want to patent it, because it’s my idea and I reckon I came up with it first and I want to patent it. You see, there are different types of bipolar and I think I’ve got bipolar and ADHD. But I think I’ve got ADHD and bipolar type 2 which means if the ADHD gets out of control the psychosis bypasses the bipolar…

“I heard Safran and Father Bob on the radio and they were confused but clued in! And so I wrote to Safran and I said I knew more than him and I said ‘sorry if that sounds ignorant but it’s true…”

Jane is aware of the people around her, and she knows that they each are suffering from their own flavour of mental illness, and Jane knows too that she suffers from bipolar. She knows I am a skeptic, and she knows she also is quite logical and rational, and she is. Usually. But here she is, saying things that I very much doubt are true. She claims to be more clued into what’s happening around her than other people are. She uses some scientific language which makes her sound more credible, but the ideas themselves are not quite coherent or based in reality.

When a skeptic finds themselves talking to a person who defies evidence, logic, and reason for the sake of a belief they have made up their mind to believe, lets call them a true believer,… When a skeptic finds themselves talking to a true believer, often the skeptic can’t help thinking something like “they’re crazy!” or “that’s insane!” Skeptics have learnt how to think critically about incoming information and how to reason, and so they are quick to detect when a person’s reasoning is faulty. When I was talking to Jane, I was looking at her in the exact same way I would look at someone who was using terrible logic to justify a belief in something that probably didn’t exist, in other words, a true believer.

I’ve listed here the logical fallacies that I think Jane may have made while she was talking to me:

Self deception – the act of misleading ourselves to accept as true or valid what is false or invalid
Retrospective Falsification – the process of creating false memories by selecting and reshaping memories of real incidents in the past
Wishful thinking – interpreting facts in a way that adheres to what one would like to find rather than what actually is the case
Magical Thinking – holding the notion that things can be causally connected in a way that defies scientific testing
Non Sequitur – reaching a conclusion that does not follow from the stated premises
Confirmation Bias – where one tends to remember things that confirms their belief, and forgets what contradicts it
Confabulation – to unintentionally turn the memory of a fantasy into the memory of a factual account
Apophenia – the tendency to see connections and meaning between seemingly unrelated objects or ideas.

Perhaps it’s the apophenia talking, but true believers seem to have the same, and sometimes more varied, faulty thinking as Jane with her bipolar. Having thought about this, I realised the true meaning of the words “crazy” and “insane”: a complete lack of critical thinking – the opposite extreme of skepticism. In my mind I see superficial similarities in the processing of information by true believers and people with a delusional-​​type mental illness, such as schizophrenia or bipolar.

Advances in medical science over the last 30 years have shown us that mental illnesses are caused by having the wrong brain chemistry. I don’t claim to have perfect brain chemistry, but I know the difference between good logic and bad, and I like to think that I assess incoming information in a reasonable manner. The true believers, however, who hold dear to everything they believe in the face of evidence and reason, what’s their excuse for acting mentally ill?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 8:35 pm and is filed under Dahli Breidis, Pseudoscience, Skeptic, The Pseudo Scientists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.