Endemic Pathogens Are Making You Crazy and Then Killing You (opens in new tab)

I don’t think it’s new, just more visible than it used to be.

When I was a teenager, I took the New Age/occult section of the bookstore seriously[0]. It feels silly in retrospect, but it’s not really any weirder than the religious beliefs I was brought up with, nor the presence of horoscopes in all the newspapers and advertised elsewhere without getting banned under the Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951, nor the then-new National Lottery being shown with a regular segment by a fortune teller called Mystic Meg, nor the endless TV shows about ancient aliens and ghosts and telepathy, and you might be surprised how long people continued to say crop circles “had to be supernatural” after their secret was revealed to be two blokes and a stick.

Edit: Oh, and my mum insisted on handing out homeopathic sand and white paint pigment[2]. And the Bach flower remedies “for memory” (she got Alzheimer’s 20 years younger than her mum). Plus all the stuff about crystal powers, dowsing rods, the whole caboodle.

[0] So, naturally I tried the shape-shifting turn-yourself-into-a-werewolf spell I found online[1], and now I’m a furry.

[1] The original website is long gone, but this looks like the same text I saw 25 years ago: http://www.paganlibrary.com/rituals_spells/russian_shifting_...

[2] No, seriously: https://homeopathicremediesonline.com/product/titanium-oxyda...

I unironically blame the pervasiveness of drugs, namely cannabis and alcohol. They seem to be causing serious damage in a large subset of the population. Perhaps it has always been the case but we are more aware of such issues now.

However I know several people who are not drug users have similarly sunk into a state of paranoia or madness. Truly a sad state of affairs and I hope we can identify it, and treat them if possible because it seems telling them outright their thoughts/actions are manic is perceived as an insult.

I think that the current legitimacy crisis is the cause for this. Once you have one core source/belief invalidated, it's super easy to slide into more fringe views.

Anyone that has had to deal with any sort of customer support after Covid knows that things just aren’t right. It’s like talking to people from another planet. I don’t know if it is Covid brain or what.

The isolation from covid restrictions, combined with loads of the major conspiracy talking points coming true[0], could easily lead people down this big rabbit hole if their brain is so inclined. I know my brain tends to think in this way and I really felt the pull into crazy land. I mostly avoided going too far and as things have opened up I think I'm now back to a more reasonable view of reality, but I have sympathy for and understanding of the people who became this way recently.

[0] mandatory vaccinations, health passports, cashless society, great reset, etc etc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis maybe? "Up to half of the world's population is infected by toxoplasmosis, but have no symptoms." (No symptoms that we/they know of but read about how it affects mice. Makes them crazy reckless and wanna go get eaten by a cat.)

> I find it hard to understand many people’s transition into madness any other way.

There was no transition. They were always like this and that is the default.

It is possible they were always that susceptible(I suspect they were), someone just needed the means for mass delivery and when it was available(social media) they weaponized it at just the right time.

Lead poisoning combined with elder brain makes more sense

Leaded gasoline wasn't banned till the 70s and only really eliminated by the 90s.

At least the title, "Endemic Pathogens Are Making You Crazy And Then Killing You", can be accepted as a default prior, rather than an extraordinary claim. Many diseases are both prevalent and not under heavy study. Funding and interest in studying a disease is partially caused by individuals being able to link the disease to a symptom, and this is hard without data. (You rolled a 4, but is the die biased toward 4? It's impossible to tell from a single roll.) When these diseases are occasionally looked into, such as with hookworm and toxoplasmosis, the track record finds harms at an alarming rate, so we should expect the remaining diseases, which are not yet looked into, to have similar rates of danger.

Thus, without making assertions on the article's individual claims, the general thrust is broadly true. The reason people hold the "these diseases are generally harmless" prior is likely from another prior, "if X disease were so harmful, doctors would be studying it", and that unfortunately does not match current practice.

Covid-19 provides an example of how hard it is to link symptoms. We know now that anosmia is solidly connected to Covid-19, but this was not known for a while. The CDC only listed three official symptoms six months after the outbreak [0], reflecting the understanding at the time. Doctors talked about their patients and found commonalities; this bubbled anecdotes into attention. So even with intense and joint attention by the world, with a clear and reliable symptom, the symptom can evade notice for a while. When nobody's attention is on a disease, and the symptoms are chronic, the symptoms become invisible.

Caveat: this is not my field, and I do not study it. An epidemiologist could likely present a more accurate picture.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200415000910/https://www.cdc.g...

Out of curiosity, what is the treatment?

Standard treatment for decades has been oral acyclovir.

Taking lysine is one I've read about in the past.

Cats (especially indoor cats) are an extremely uncommon human vector for toxoplasmosis, as noted in the article.