What’s concerning to me is that it seems as though there’s a dynamic of patients coming in with a fixed belief of how to diagnose their illness, how their symptoms should be treated, and how to treat it in a way that’s completely divorced from the kinds of medicine you’d find in textbooks—and that the same dynamic is starting to extend to other illnesses, too.
The therapist committed to being there when the conspiracy fever breaks
Damien Stewart
Psychologist
Warsaw, Poland
Before covid, I hadn’t really had any clients bring up conspiracy theories into my practice. But once the pandemic began, they went from being fun or harmless to something dangerous.
In my experience, vaccines were the topic where I first really started to see some militancy—people who were looking down the barrel of losing their jobs because they wouldn’t get vaccinated. At one point, I had an out-and-out conspiracy theorist say to me, “I might as well wear a yellow star like the Jews during the Holocaust, because I won’t get vaccinated.”
I felt pure anger, and I reached a point in my therapeutic journey I didn’t know would ever occur—I’d found that I had a line that could be crossed by a client that I could not tolerate. I spoke in a very direct manner he probably wasn’t used to and challenged his conspiracy theory. He got very angry and hung up the call.
It made me figure out how I was going to deal with this in future, and to develop an approach—which was to not challenge the conspiracy theory, but to gently talk through it, to provide alternative points of view and ask questions. I try to find the therapeutic value in the information, in the conversations we’re having. My belief is and evidence seems to show that people believe in conspiracy theories because there’s something wrong in their life that is inexplicable, and they need something to explain what’s happening to them. And even if I have no belief or agreement whatsoever in what they’re saying, I think I need to sit here and have this conversation, because one day this person might snap out of it, and I need to be here when that happens.
... continue reading