Diseases And Disorders

"Paranoia is infectious. It’s also an incredibly useful tool. If you can make people afraid enough, uncertain enough, they will simply stop moving."

"Only the severe end was even considered. There was no sense of spectrum. Paranoia was very much seen as inexplicable, un-understandable, if anything some kind of biological system that had gone wrong. I remember thinking that seemed very reductionalist, that there must be some kind of psychology to it. Once I started looking at it as a spectrum, once you make the connection to things such as depression and anxiety, it really opens it up. People with depression have higher levels of paranoia because of a sense of vulnerability and low self-esteem. Anxiety is linked too. But whereas anxiety may lead to fearing harm from a spider, or of being humiliated in a social situation, it doesn't lead to a belief that the spider or others intend to humiliate or hurt us. It's the attribution of intent that distinguishes paranoia."

""Some people have become so cynical that they don't believe in anything any more. In them, healthy scepticism has been replaced by a total breakdown in trust, the belief that everybody lies."

"You get paranoid in this business. But maybe paranoids get that way because of all the people out to get them."

"In a world full of threat, it may be kind of beneficial for people to be on guard. It's good to be looking around and see who's following you and what's happening. Not everybody is trying to get you, but some people may be."

"A paranoid man is a man who knows a little about what's going on."

"In a captive environment, paranoia is unavoidable. Only the prison authorities call it paranoia; prisoners call it sensible precautions... Most prisoners are perfectly mentally healthy compared with the paranoia of prison officials."

"Then I could turn around and justify that, by saying that it isn’t really paranoia if there really are people out to get you."

"Paranoia ain't the way to live your life from day to day, so leave your doubts and your fears behind."

"We are bombarded with information about our alert status and we're told to report suspicious-looking characters. That primes people to be more paranoid."

"Just because you're paranoid Don't mean they're not after you"

"It's not paranoia if they're really after you."

"I think in the paranoid spectrum it's quite clear that you're more likely to have paranoid thoughts if you're younger and if you live in cities or were raised in cities, for example. It also links to taking illicit substances such as cannabis. But as a psychologist what I'm particularly interested in is that people who tend to worry more, people who aren't sleeping so well, people who feel more miserable about themselves, are also more vulnerable to paranoid thoughts."

"There is no sort of 'them and us', it is not that most people don't have paranoid thoughts and a few people have many, it seems that they are evenly distributed across the population, or many of us have them, much more than was previously thought. And actually there is also evidence that societies that are perhaps more unequal, have less social cohesion, are all societies where there is a bit more suspicion in the general population. So paranoia certainly can be a problem for the individual, and I work in hospitals and see people who have severe experiences, but also it's perhaps the mark of the health of a society, the levels of mistrust within it."

"Paranoia all too often leads to isolation, unhappiness, and profound distress. But the exceptionally positive immediate results for the patients in this study show a new route forward in treatment. In just a thirty minute session, those who used the right psychological techniques showed major reductions in paranoia."

"This is another main reason why I believe paranoia is on the increase. Because we are constantly reminded, in the press, of threats from other people, we overestimate the chances of these events happening to us. There is a lot of research on this. It is what is known as the 'availability heuristic'. We make an estimate of the likelihood of a particular event simply by how easily we bring it to mind. Our children are getting fat because we aren't letting them out to play enough. We're scared they will be run over or abducted by strangers. In fact, the risks to the health from obesity are much higher than the risks of either of those events."

"It's a very scary disease—kills people in a horrible way—and had there been an epidemic here, it would've been a terrible thing. But, only two people caught Ebola here in America; neither died. Even in West Africa, where there was an epidemic, more people were killed by other diseases like the flu. When the scare was at its peak, I tried to provoke the women on the Fox show Outnumbered by saying this: "This is an overhyped risk being pumped by news media like us." … Again, without putting up walls, no American caught Ebola here and died from it. By contrast, a hundred Americans were killed by deer this year."

"AIDS, Ebola, Lyme disease and SARS. Most of these are believed to have moved from wildlife to human populations."

"One of the sticking points of getting foreign medical staffs into these three countries has been the lack of medical evacuation."

"For those who have yet to pledge, I say please do so soon, … This is an unforgiving disease."

"[The outbreak is] the greatest peacetime challenge that the United Nations and its agencies have ever faced."

"Ebola? Let me tell you something about Ebola, baby. Ebola is a case of DANDRUFF compared to me!"

"You’ve got to balance the compassionate-use aspect with trying to figure out whether it works."

"The Ebola epidemic ravaging parts of West Africa is the most severe acute public health emergency seen in modern times. Never before in recorded history has a biosafety level four pathogen infected so many people so quickly, over such a broad geographical area, for so long."

"West Africa is experiencing the largest, most severe, most complex outbreak of Ebola virus disease in history."

"At the moment, our big problem is finding the patients in a timely way and convincing them to come to the treatment center. If you don’t have a carrot to hang out there and bring people in, then you can’t contain it."

"When Ebola ripped through communities in West Africa between 2014 and 2016, Tolbert Nyenswah saw at first hand how health workers extinguished the epidemic by finding and quarantining contacts of those who caught the disease. The former director of Liberia’s public-health institute thought contact-tracers would again rise to the challenge this year, keeping COVID-19 in check as it swept the globe. “Contact-tracing is one of the greatest tools that countries should deploy and use effectively to contain the outbreak,” he says."

"Fabian Leendertz, a veterinarian at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, will bring his expertise in spillover events. In April 2014, Leendertz visited Meliandou village in Guinea, months after a two-year-old died of Ebola — the first person reported to be infected in West Africa. Work by Leendertz, including interviews with locals and environmental sampling, suggests that the outbreak started in bats that lived in a hollow tree where the children used to play. The tree was burned down days before his arrival and no Ebola virus was detected in nearby bats, which he says highlights the difficulties of pinning down an outbreak’s beginnings."

"What if it had killed both of them? It is only because it worked, seemingly very well, that people are screaming, 'How come people in Africa didn't get it?'If the first people (to receive doses of ZMapp) would have been Liberian, headlines would have screamed, 'Experimental drug tested on poor Africans,'"

"You really worry how people in a vulnerable population will understand the risks. Do you think you can give informed consent, or are you likely to be coercive? How would I explain the risk of a brand-new drug to an African patient?"

"Some people look at the word 'expedited' as very favorable. Who wouldn't want something expedited? It can be very hard to say that's not a good thing to do. But history says a lot of time when we rush things through, people are harmed."

"I think that this is very unfortunate for perceptions of global justice."

"It would have been the front-page screaming headline: ‘Africans used as guinea pigs for American drug company’s medicine’"

"I'd say we have a couple of people who've recovered, they've gotten excellent medical care and the specific therapy, ZMapp … may have had a role in it but we don't know."

"[The WHO panel] concluded unanimously that it would be acceptable on both ethical and evidential grounds to use as potential treatments or for prevention unregistered interventions that have shown promising results in the laboratory and in animal models but have not yet been evaluated for safety and efficacy in humans, provided that certain conditions are met. In reaching these conclusions, the panel members were mindful that this is a departure from the well-established, historically evolved system of regulation and governance of therapies and interventions. Ethical and scientific criteria must guide the use of unregistered interventions. The ethical criteria include transparency about all aspects of care, so that maximum information is obtained about the effects of the interventions, fair distribution in the face of scarcity, promotion of cosmopolitan solidarity, informed consent, freedom of choice, confidentiality, respect for the person, preservation of dignity and involvement of the community."

"The goal is clear: to get pedophiles out of schools – those already there, and those among young graduates applying for teaching jobs. The means exist – at least some means do, notably stricter psychological testing of applicants. The Rorschach ink blot test is an old favorite – show the testee a splash of ink and ask what it represents, the answer being indicative, presumably, of the state of the testee’s psychological health. An alternative, increasingly popular in Japan, is a test developed in the 1940s at the University of Minnesota. It’s known as MMPI – the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory."

"Lewd conduct by teachers is causing growing concern. As this column reported last month, citing Shukan Post, education ministry figures show 205 public elementary and junior high school teachers nationwide – more than ever before – being disciplined for obscene behavior inside or outside the classroom."

"The problem was largely the result of poor seminary training and insufficient emotional support for men ordained in the 1940s and 1950s"

"Many (abusers) appear to use grooming tactics to entice children into complying with the abuse, and the abuse occurs in the home of the alleged abuser or victim."

"Like in the general population, child sex abuse in the Catholic Church appears to be committed by men close to the children they allegedly abuse."

"The sheer scale and longevity of the torment inflected on defenceless children – over 800 known abusers in over 200 Catholic institutions during a period of 35 years – should alone make it clear that it was not accidental or opportunistic but systematic. Abuse was not a failure of the system. It was the system."

"As soon as we would give the name of a defendant … (rabbis and others) would engage this community in a relentless search for the victims...And they're very, very good at identifying the victims. And then the victims would be intimidated and threatened, and the case would fall apart."

"They are more afraid of the outside world than the deviants within their own community. The deviants threaten individuals here or there, but the outside world threatens everyone and the entire structure of their world."

"They think that anyone who turns over anyone to the outside authorities is committing a transgression to the community at large."

"Now you have a child bot that’s indicating pleasure to these sexual activities? That could be very detrimental to the individual’s cognitive understanding."

"I don’t know how high up the chain that power goes, but I know that it probably is outside of the film industry too. It’s probably in government; it’s probably throughout the world in different dark aspects."

"It is easy to think that when we talk about the crisis of child rape and abuse that we are talking about the past – and the Catholic Church would have us believe that this most tragic era in church history is over. It is not. It lives on today. Pedophiles are still in the priesthood. Coverups of their crimes are happening now, and bishops in many cases are continuing to refuse to turn information over to the criminal justice system. Cases are stalled and cannot go forward because the church has such power to stop them. Children are still being harmed and victims cannot heal."

"Suggs (1966, pp. 51-53) cited many cases of full heterosexual intercourse in public between adults and prepubertal individuals in Polynesia. The crews of the visiting ships showed no compunction against the activities, and the natives assisted in the efforts. Cunnilingus with young females was recorded without accompanying remarks that this kind of behavior was unusual or disapproved of for the participants. Occasions were recorded of elders assisting youngsters in having sex with other elders. Among the Marquesas Islanders in particular, Suggs (1966, p. 119) reported, extramarital relations were frequent and often involved older males with young virginal females and older females with young virginal males."

"Peripubertal females, in many cultures of Oceania, were noted to often be publicly sexually active with adults (Oliver, 1974, p. 362). Cook (1773, Vol. 1, p. 128) reported copulation in public in Hawai‘i between an adult male and a female estimated to be 11 or 12 “without the least sense of it being indecent or improper.” The disapproval implicit in Cook’s report probably was caused as much by the public nature of the activity as by the age-related aspects. In Tahiti, one missionary noted in his diary that the High Priest Manimani, “though nearly blind with age, is as libidinous now as when thirty years younger; …[he] has frequently upwards of a dozen females with him, some of them apparently not above twelve or thirteen years of age” (cited in Danielsson, 1986, P. 57).Gauguin credited the inspiration for his famous painting “Manao tupapau” (“The Specter Watches Over Her”), completed in 1892, to his 13-year-old Tahitian “wife” Teha‘amana (Hobhouse, 1988)."

"To excuse pedophiliac assaults in general, or to make light of the horrific experiences of others, was a thousand miles from my intention."