You can just say “I don’t see anything here” and mark it as casual, iNat doesn’t forbid you from telling someone that you don’t see a particular organism in the photo, you’re just expected to be civil about it. Nobody is saying to purposefully reinforce people’s delusions to avoid hurting their feelings, there’s just no point in arguing with someone who is having an episode of psychosis just like there’s no point in repeatedly telling dementia patients that their perception of reality is wrong. They need a doctor to rule out other causes for their symptoms and mental health professionals, not some people online to tell them they’re crazy.
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Wow is right. This is just mind-blowing that it is that prevalent. Dare I call it a public mental health crisis?
I don’t imagine it’s prevelant enough to be considered one, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the rise in health scams telling people they need to detox or something else along those lines (I’ve seen ones that claim people have some kind of parasite that doctors can’t detect and that’s why they need this special herbal tea or whatever) has ended up triggering this kind of delusion in people who are already prone to psychosis.
The prevalence of DP is up for debate but one study apparently found that it was around 27 in 100,000 people, which doesn’t sound like many, but there are roughly 334.9 million people in the US, so that ends up being around 90,000 people with DP, and that’s not even taking into account that many people probably go undiagnosed for a variety of reasons. On the one hand, it’s considered rare, and on the other hand, that’s still a huge number of people who have it. It’s one of those weird unintuitive things about statistics and rare conditions.
The thing about psychosis is that there are many reasons someone might not seek help. I didn’t open up to anyone about some of my delusions for years because I recognised people wouldn’t react well even if it felt true to me, and I know other people who hid their symptoms and refused to see doctors for similar reasons.
Meanwhile other people might contact doctor after doctor and then turn to other professions when that doesn’t get them anywhere, and we don’t know whether the entomologists getting lots of calls is from a small group calling repeatedly, or a large group calling once or twice.
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Based on what I’ve read/watched, it’s often a small group of people but calling numerous times.
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I listened to the podcast mentioned in this thread and one of the entomologists angrily mentioned his concern about some ‘professional’ pest control businesses who take full advantage of the situation and sell complete, highest level extermination services for sites that they know full well do not contain anything to exterminate.
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I assume this is partially a function of how many doctors there are vs. how many entomologists there are. There are orders of magnitude more doctors.
So if there are 7000 members of the Entomological Society of America, that’s 12-13 cases each (I have no idea what proportion of entomologists are members of course). But there are well over a million doctors (not to mention all the other types of medical professionals), so the overwhelming majority would never even see one.
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I’m so glad to see so many people have responded with compassion. The thing about these beliefs is that none of us are going to change them. Logic, information, and so on will not help the sufferer. Delusions are not like being misinformed or ignorant, and trying to educate the person having them is not going to help.
The only thing that can help is medical intervention. As mentioned, disagreeing/telling people they are wrong is often counterproductive in dealing with people with dementia, delusions, and psychosis, and may make it less likely they feel they can trust a medical doctor to help them with the problem.
Don’t be afraid that a lack of strong disavowal is reinforcing the false belief. Psychosis and delusions do not work that way.
The people suffering from DP and other similar disorders almost always have anosognosia during episodes (and often between), a lack of insight into the fact that they are suffering from delusions.
I do think if someone is going to interact with such posts, “I don’t see anything” is about the best we can do.
I am not sure “Life” is going to be the best catch-all though, so I would refrain even from that. A lot of evidence presented for DP will be some lint or threads or other non-living matter. If it was a picture of the person’s body, “Life” could be correct, as it’s a human, and I guess “Life” might be correct even for collections of debris in the way a picture of a stop sign would be evidence that humans had been there. Personally I would just refrain from marking these as anything entirely.
This is such a tough topic for everyone involved.
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There’s a line in the DQA that is appropriate for things like this. Just downvote “Evidence of Organism”.
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