The COVID-19 pandemic

[ijmorlan]

I doubt it is mental illness and is instead just extremely poor rationalization for their dislike of masks.

This is something I’ve tried to think about, without much success.

I know that some mental illnesses have symptoms that include people believing manifestly, obviously, and definitely untrue things, such as that voices in the walls are telling them to harm people.

But there are many people who have weird conspiracy theory beliefs, of a level of craziness that is simply incompatible with correct thinking processes. To be clear, I don’t mean everybody who disagrees with me or even most people who disagree; I mean stuff like this, or the politician in the States who thought he got Covid from wearing a mask. This is thinking which is clearly maladaptive; but does that make it a mental illness? I’m not really clear what a mental illness even is. If it has to involve a chemical imbalance or something like that, then it’s at least in principle clear; if people think weird stuff about masks because of a chemical imbalance then it’s a mental illness; if it’s because they have poor thinking skills then it’s not.

So I don’t really know, but you’re absolutely right that I should not characterize it as mental illness.