Leftwing Psychosis

Paranoia doesn't care what your politics are.

“He argued with himself about all things under heaven with that kind of wrong-headed lucidity which may be observed in some lunatics.”

— Joseph Conrad, An Outpost of Progress

In the summer of 2019 I was working in Logan, Utah as a stage electrician at an opera company for their three-month summer season. On a lunch break, I stopped in a little antique shop in downtown and my eye was caught by a very old looking guitar, priced at just twelve dollars. It was missing its pick guard, obvious because of the different colored wood where its shape had once been. The wood facing was cracking in several places. The neck was separating slightly from the body with a little wiggle back and forth, a kind of unwanted whammy bar. The bridge was also separating from the body, with the wood top going slightly concave at that position between it and the sound hole, and thus the action of the strings was too high towards the top of the neck and the guitar’s entire intonation was really out of whack. It was missing a couple tuning pegs. The logo inside the body was barely discernible, crinkled and weathered with age, but I could just make out the maker as Landola, a Finnish brand I’d never heard of, my guess made sometime in the ‘40s or ‘50s. In spite, or because of, all these problems, I really liked the way the guitar sounded, though not the way it played. It had a real woody, old-timey sound to it that I’d never owned in an instrument before. So I bought it for the twelve bucks. The hard-shell case I purchased for it cost more than the guitar. I need to use a pair of pliers to tune the strings that have the missing tuning pegs, clenched down as hard as possible so as not to further strip the metal nubs. And since the intonation is so terrible, I have to tune the strings specifically to whatever chords are used in a particular song, because the moment you start fretting the neck whatever tuning you’ve done to the open strings goes out the window. And even then, sometimes I have to fret a note a half-step down and then bend it up to get the proper note. This is to say, I’ve figured out ways to play around the brokenness of the instrument, and it is worth it to me to do all this because the guitar’s sound is so cool, and really what do you expect for twelve dollars?

This beloved guitar of mine is now in possession of a psychotic man. I don’t mean that as an exaggeration. For the past seven months, my guitar has been sitting fallow, locked away but still viewable from the outside through the front window of an instrument repair shop owned by a man who has been having a psychotic break with reality. This man’s initial freakout just happened to coincide with me giving him my guitar to see what, if any, repairs he could make to it. I know he is psychotic because he has been broadcasting his severe paranoia on social media in a long, bizarre, sad series of posts documenting his steady, months-long slide into insanity.

Through my voyeurism into his decline, I’m troubled by three main things:

1. This man, being of a generally leftwing sensibility, colors his entire paranoia with leftwing, anti-government conspiratorial blather, latching on to some things which are true, like ubiquitous surveillance of our communications and ongoing meddling by deep state government agencies into the private affairs of the citizenry, and weaving those true things into an incoherent blanket around himself where his psychotic brain is telling him that he is at the center of a multiagency psy-op campaign directed against him specifically because? Why? Not exactly clear, though one of his online posts suggests that he had formulated an all encompassing theory of life, society, human development, everything, which the state doesn’t want him to tell the world about. Our current surveillance apparatuses and deep state agencies (CIA, NSA, FBI, etc.) seem tailor made to give the psychotic paranoid mind all the confirmation it needs to keep on being paranoid.
   

2. Looking at many of the people commenting on his posts, particularly on TikTok, a majority of them are people who are actively making his psychosis worse by telling him, not that he’s crazy and thus making him more defensive, but that what he is perceiving isn’t even the half of it, that there’s so much more to the conspiracy, confirming every suspicion that he has and feeding into it, saying they’ve seen the G-Men too, and that he is right to go further and further into paranoid oblivion.
   

3. I can’t play my guitar.

I’ve known this guy for a while now. I first met him back in 2017 when I saw him and his band St. Cinder play a show in Ashland, Oregon where I promptly fell in love with their music. I ran into him the next day and he gave me a copy of one of their CDs, Vagabond Dreams, a modern classic of the genre by my estimation. Years later, passing through Ashland in 2023, I took an old banjo of mine to his place to get repaired because the action was messed up and the neck was wiggly. I had run into him the night before at an open mic that he was hosting, apparently for the last time as he was passing off the reigns to someone else. “Do you all feel the full circle of all this?” he asked the crowd before starting the set off with some guitar playing. He became visibly verklempt for a moment and started into a sweet, melodic instrumental song that segued into a jaunty rendition of “Make Me A Pallet On the Floor,” his rich, solid baritone anchoring the center of our evening. After the show, a few of us hung around with him. One of his old bandmates was there. They discussed certain old time New Orleans musicians and the minutiae of their playing styles with typical musical geekery that was at once difficult to parse but also not pretentious sounding. After they both remembered the name of a particular song, they began singing it and harmonizing together, with me simply a contented part of their circle, smiling like a fool. They engaged in witty back and forth banter, with a unique kind of lyricism and esoterica to it that is decidedly unlike most conversations you’re bound to overhear. I can only assume this conversational style as being the product of their mutual years on the road, trapped together in a broken down bus, immersed in the travelling bard, folk-punk adjacent subculture.

And what would be his next endeavor since leaving the open mic hosting duties? “Searching for sanity,” he said. “I’m just a fuckup. I need to just break down. I just need a couple weeks to get away. I need to go up into the mountains and do some mushrooms. If I had no ties here I would just go disappear out into the desert. No —this place is my home. I just need to get out of town for a bit.”

The next day I sat with him in his little repair shop as he worked on my banjo. He uses the word “indeed” almost like a nervous tic. He’s got a standard everyday getup for himself, usually something like a well-made retro coat, a short scarf, thick mustache, old heeled leather boots, overalls, a dark grey cap, and a knitted sweater. He looks a walking anachronism, which feels less like an affectation and more a natural comfort that the years have settled him into. It works on him. And his line of work fits right in with his fashion aesthetic. The craft of instrument repair uses techniques and tools perfected well-before the 20th century, with things like handmade wooden clamps and glue made from animal hide. His old-timey feel makes it strangely, reversely anachronistic to hear him talk about his problems with tweekers ripping him off in vehicle deals gone bad, the recent breakthroughs he’s had in therapy, and his “side-interest” in the paranormal. “But really all my interests are side-interests,” he said. “I have no main interest.” His repair shop, in all its bedraggled glory, looked so much like the handful of indelible, visually cacophonous workshops I’ve stumbled into that are owned by aging, eccentric bachelors, or bachelors at heart. Tools and parts are strewn all over the damn place. “Screwdrivers, oddly enough, seem to be the one thing that I can never find the right size for.” Thankfully, the visual chaos of the shop did not translate to a chaos of craftsmanship. If a certain tool could not be found, an alternative was quickly procured or a different technique settled upon. He saw me eyeing his books. “If you see anything of interest on the bookshelf I can just throw it your way. I’m a bad capitalist, I suppose.”

I grabbed his copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and began flipping through it. “I picked up that copy of Malcom X because, well, it’s kind of a long story,” he said. “So the Men in Black are an actual phenomenon that lots of people have seen over the years, it’s not just those silly movies. And in a lot of the cases the men have these Asiatic features, like northern Asia, Mongolian features. There’s a part in the book where Malcolm X is in jail and just before he’s released he talks about these men in black that come to his cell and they have those same Asiatic features.” My interest piqued by his conspiratorial fascination, I later searched for this passage in the book. Malcolm X devotes just two small paragraphs to the incident, nestled in amongst his rapturous descriptions of how his disciplined, voracious reading and study in prison broadened and deepened his level of critical thought and political analysis. Malcolm X writes, offhandedly:

It was the next night, as I lay on my bed, I suddenly, with a start, became aware of a man sitting beside me in my chair. He had on a dark suit. I remember. I could see him as plainly as I see anyone I look at. He wasn’t black, and he wasn’t white. He was light-brown-skinned, an Asiatic cast of countenance, and he had oily black hair.

I looked right into his face.

I didn’t get frightened. I knew I wasn’t dreaming. I couldn’t move, I didn’t speak, and he didn’t. I couldn’t place him racially — other than that I knew he was a non-European. I had no idea whatsoever who he was. He just sat there. Then, suddenly as he had come, he was gone.

Sounds to me like a pretty run-of-the-mill description of the common phenomenon of a sleep paralysis demon. But some people always seem to find the paranormal in the everyday.

Sitting in his shop, I asked him if he wanted to share more about his troubles, those things he wanted to get away from. He told me his ex was stalking him. He got a restraining order on her. “If I can see her she could get arrested. And it’s a small town so I’m sure she resents that. I was in a dark place. Seeing the things she did to herself are things that I’m still getting over.” He told me he lived with a married couple for a time, but no longer. “They broke up because of me.” He told me the tweeker woman who ripped him off has a dad who is the local district attorney. “I think she’s the kind of person who’d rather see me dead than see me in court.”

He held my banjo overnight to let the repairs set, and I paid him in cash more than he asked for. He later met me at a coffee shop and returned a capo that I left at his shop, and also gifted me a new set of strings so I could “try out some other tunings” more fitting for the tenor banjo. We hugged, then he stood at attention and saluted me goodbye.

The next time I saw him, over a year later, things were different. Everything, really. The whole town felt different. Like mania and paranoia and death had taken over. The Oregon hippies felt malevolent. The college kids felt vapid. The rich liberal fucks felt richer. “Just going through the downfall of Western civilization,” he told me. Elsewhere in town a man named Marcus, a local beloved street musician, was walking on the side of the road at night and got hit by a van and killed. A friend of mine told me that her schizophrenic ex who’d been stalking her called in a wellness check on her, and then later he grabbed a cop’s gun, maybe hoping to get shot, but got locked up instead. Another street denizen named Fortune told me he lent his van, his home and only shelter, to some guy who took it out of state and ended up totaling it in a collision with other vehicles, and now the cops were looking for him. A man named David told me about his camping equipment that got stolen by cops in L.A., and about his sizeable inheritance that was stolen and dwindled away. He spent some time in Switzerland and tried to go back there but they wouldn’t let him on the plane. Why not? Unclear. He said he was being surveilled by diabolical people. “Diabolical” was a little pet word of his. Everything was diabolical. A manic depressive woman told me she realized that she was having a manic episode and so she went to the hospital. Seems like the sane thing to do, right? Well, they basically just said they couldn’t help her and they kicked her out on the street. As soon as she left the hospital she tried to steal a car in the parking lot, or rather she tried to drive an already running car with the door left open because her psychotic brain told her that the white car was an angel beckoning her to enter it. And then the car owner ran up and beat the shit out of her while yelling at someone to bring him his gun. She got thrown in jail with a fucked up face and no treatment. And then they just kicked her out of the jail onto the street without a phone or a wallet or anything.

Death feels everywhere. It’s bad for the soul. This is what George Orwell meant when he said: “It is a kind of duty to see and smell such places now and again, especially smell them, lest you should forget that they exist; though perhaps it is better not to stay there too long.” Perhaps it is better not to stay too long. This shit rubs off on you. It’s not just that crazy people live on the street. It’s that living on the street also makes you crazy.

Hard times, hard times,
It’s hard I know.
Face this winter, you’re alone.
Falling, falling into your hole,
Where does it go, where does it go?
I still don’t know.

— “Winter’s Lament,” by St. Cinder

So anyway, this last time around I had given Mr. Repairman my beat up old Landola guitar for him to fix. And then he just skipped town. “I’m very much in physical danger,” he told me, “otherwise I wouldn’t have gone so long like this, I’m very sorry it got locked up like this. This is just one of the few emergencies that seems to run on forever, but it will have to evolve at some point. I very very much apologize again.” At this point I’d seen his paranoid posts on social media, so I knew he was delusional. I offered him whatever help I could, but never heard back. He took his bus — his only home — and, trying to flee from whoever was following him, who were apparently trying to set his bus on fire, he began driving it until it would not drive any more. By his own account:

I drove almost 10,000 miles in a single month trying to outrun and outmaneuver local, county, state, and federal law enforcement intelligence officials in the United States to the point where my bus that I live in had no power brakes, no power steering, no reverse — windshield is glued together. I managed to get it to the side of the road, escape in a taxi, get an emergency passport and a flight to Switzerland, and I still managed to get my bus towed to a transmission shop so that it can get worked on while I am trying to figure out my damn life.

Switzerland! What’s with crazy people going to Switzerland? Apparently their paranoid brain says, “Where can a poor persecuted man such as myself who’s at the center of a grand conspiracy find sanctuary in this world constricted by diabolical tentacles?” Switzerland! The famously neutral country! They don’t want no trouble there. The Alps, the yodeling, the fresh air, the lederhosen, the white people. If it was good enough for the Von Trapp children then it’s good enough for me! Well, after some time bumming around Europe he got deported from Norway back to New York, and then somehow found himself on a train in Guadalajara, where he pulled the emergency brake because apparently he saw smoke coming from the rails. He then found himself in China (China!) of all places, a perfect place for a paranoid mind to rest and recoup right? He then made it to Thailand, where his behavior got him locked up in an immigration center where a fellow inmate beat the shit out of him. He posted his bruised face and has been suffering from chest pain ever since. Then another jaunt back to Dublin, Ireland which got him deported to Boston, and so on and so on and so on.

What a mess. Your mind is a physical thing, subject to the material world, and when it is hijacked by psychosis it will use whatever is already inside it to feed you self-perpetuating delusions. If you were a lefty before the psychosis, be prepared for malign corporate forces and the CIA to be syphoning funds from your bank account and trailing you in unmarked cars. If you were a right-winger, antifa communists are probably putting razorblades in your food. The left has long been acquainted with loss of faith, despair, despondency, and yes — mental illness. This fallen world is great at making anyone who wants to change anything about it feel like a total crazy person. As China Mieville writes, “To live according to radical politics, perhaps more than with any other approach to the world, can be to experience moments in which hope and lament, utopia and apocalypse, are inextricable.” Elsewhere, in his history of the Russian Revolution, Mieville writes about the depression felt by many of the revolutionaries before their salvation arrived:

Among the left diaspora, despair, mental illness and suicide are not uncommon. In Paris in 1910, Prigara, a starving, deranged veteran of the Moscow barricades, visits Lenin and Krupskaya. His eyes are glassy, his voice loud. He “begins talking excitedly and incoherently about chariots filled with sheaves of corn and beautiful girls standing in the chariots.” As if he can see one of those peasant Arcadias…

But he is closer to drowned Kitezh. Prigara escapes the protections of his comrades, ties stones to his feet and neck and walks into the Seine.

Or as our instrument repairman describes his experience:

First of all, I was not supposed to survive this long. There's multiple situations every single day that I've been through where I don't think I was supposed to come out alive. The most concerning thing about this is what appears to be the collusion between law enforcement and governmental agencies, civilian contractors, other emergency services, road work crews, and, if my gut instincts are right, then criminals, gang members, and far-right civilians. Basically, I think that everything I've been through can be understood, at least the framework, by understanding what fusion centers are.

To humor him, fusion centers “are state-owned and operated centers that serve as focal points in states and major urban areas for the receipt, analysis, gathering and sharing of threat-related information between State, Local, Tribal and Territorial, federal and private sector partners,” according to the Department of Homeland Security’s website. Thus, a perfect bugbear for a left-coded delusional mind.

Ironically, there is an album that came out 27 years ago whose whole vibe is apocalyptic leftwing paranoia, made by the band Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and he used one of its songs for one of his paranoid videos, subtitled with “Have you ever been hunted down in your own country by your own government before?”:

This is all very sad, because I’ve been witnessing a good mind with generally the right ideas about the world being turned into an ugly, dangerous thing that uses those ideas to continue its own destruction. It is all the more sad and incredibly enraging to see the maxims of social media feeding into his destruction. The comments on his videos are really horrifying, especially the ones that attack anyone who tells him to get some help. The internet has created ecosystems of radicalization, communities where social capital is earned by expressing the most extreme views. For someone suffering psychosis, someone who is lonely, afraid, and self-isolating, to share their experiences online instead of with a trusted friend or family member is to further trap themselves in a world of self-serving delusions. This is another reason why the internet was a mistake. The real, social bonds of community that could help mitigate the worst effects of mental illness and head them off at their first sign are usurped by an ecosystem which cares most, not about your health, but about your most spastic, unceasing attention.

Having spent a fair amount of time letting street denizens talk at me and asking them questions in return, I’ve learned that many people who are suffering from psychosis will very often be quite articulate, confident, and emphatic about the forces that are arrayed against them, even in compelling and convincing ways, until you ask them some basic questions about their story. When faced with those questions, like, “Why didn’t they let you on the international flight?” or “Who stole your sizeable inheritance?” or “When can I have my guitar back?”, they can’t really provide straight answers, and often just go off on another diversion about something that proves how everyone is out to get them. Paranoid psychosis puts you in your own self-justifying feedback loop of delusional thinking. It is confirmation bias on steroids. Its intransigence is essential to its tragedy. It is a sickness that by its very nature resists treatment. “Last night while I was live,” he said in one video, “somebody kept trying to convince me to go to the authorities, go to the hospital, talk to somebody in real life. It's like, you sound like a Fed.” Everyone who tries to help is in on the conspiracy.

Enter forced institutionalization.

“There is nothing progressive, nothing left-wing and nothing just about leaving people to die in filth in our subways,” Freddie DeBoer writes. It is incredibly difficult in this country to get treatment to the people who need it the most, specifically because we have gotten rid of forced institutionalization unless someone meets the lofty yet vague standard of “imminent danger to themself or others.” As DeBoer writes of that national standard:

As many have argued, the standard’s utter lack of reference to mental illness itself leads to many perverse consequences, forcing doctors to pretend to be fortune tellers rather than to assess someone’s actual level of mental impairment. It also has left the families of the severely mentally ill bereft of options, such as the family of Bailey Hamor, an Indiana man suffering from schizophrenia. Hamor’s family begged medical personnel to provide treatment, but were rebuffed until Hamor stabbed another man to death. At this point, the state became all too happy to provide him with care, in prison.

As DeBoer points out, despite what many progressives contend, profound mental illness holds the potential for profound violence. “The gloating insistence from progressives that they are never bothered by the behavior of disturbed people on the subway does not fit the facts about mental illness and violence. And if we truly care for those with severe mental illness, we must be willing to understand just how deep their problems go and what must be done to help them and those around them.”

To cite just two examples that hit me close to home: In 2010, on Christmas night no less, 20-year old Andrew Downs, suffering from a severe schizophrenic episode after having run out of his medication, entered a home and shot two sisters in Santa Margarita, California, killing them. During the episode, he also stole three vehicles and entered a second home where he beat a man with a crescent wrench. “During his arrest, Downs told officers he needed to go to a mental hospital to get his medicine, which he had run out of three days earlier,” CalCoast News writes. “Doctors testified in 2012 that at the time of the murders Downs believed there was a government takeover in progress that involved the police and aliens.” Thankfully, Downs was found legally insane and committed. Perhaps he should have been there in the first place, or perhaps his meds should have been free and automatically delivered at no charge. More recently, in 2023, a UC Davis student in his junior year developed schizophrenia and stabbed three people, killing two of them — a fellow student and a local beloved itinerant man. His severe decline was noted by his friends and loved ones for over two years. He “confided in friends that he was hearing voices. A few months after starting his sophomore year, he told his then-girlfriend ‘the devil was talking to him in his dreams.’ Over that same academic year, a roommate spotted him several times moving his mouth, but with no words coming out.” His friends, roommates, coworkers, and teachers all noticed he was self-isolating, going catatonic, neglecting hygiene, losing weight, and hearing voices. And yet, here we are.

If there was a readily available mechanism by which to involuntarily commit people who are clearly suffering a mental break, a way for concerned loved ones to get their family members the care that they need, these deaths would not have happened. But that’s not the system we have. “60ish years of mental health libertarianism, smuggled in under the cover of ‘compassion’ and the hippie movement, has made it far more difficult to ensure emergency psychiatric care than it should be,” DeBoer writes. “If somebody’s an immediate danger to themselves and to others, well, you just get them to a hospital where a doctor will introduce them to Haldol and let the chips fall.” After that? Good luck.

The problem here is that regular old hospitals are incentivized not to send people to state institutions, but to turn them back out on the street. “When police take people to hospitals against their will, staffs must prepare petitions for involuntary commitment with supporting documents within 24 hours to keep them for up to three days,” reports the Belleville-News Democrat. “‘Hospitals are sometimes reluctant to do that because they don’t want to go through the burden of participating in an involuntary commitment, which will take up their time and for which they will not be compensated,” said Mark Heyrman, a retired law professor. “Insurance companies don’t pay for the time psychiatrists and other hospital staff spend to participate in court proceedings.”

But most people with psychosis never even get dragged into a regular hospital against their will. “Just because a mom or a family member says this or that happened, if a person is lucid and answering questions with responses that are coherent, there’s not a whole lot we can do,” said one police officer in regards to the Bailey Hamor case. So what can you do when you are watching someone you care about suffer a debilitating break with reality but nevertheless can make decisions for themselves, even the worst kind of decisions? As DeBoer writes:

This is a whole big ugly hard sad story, the mostly-psychotic-but-capable-of-decision-making story. Most patients want help but are desperately afraid of taking on crippling medical debt. And after convincing a deeply sick person to seek care, and then sitting there watching them try to get it in our broken system… well, it’s as hopeless and heartbreaking a feeling as I’m aware of… I’m struggling to summon the words to make you understand what it feels like when you’ve successfully wrestled with a psychotic person for long enough that they’re willing to go get medical care and they can’t because the richest nation in the history of the world isn’t willing to give it to them.

It’s insanity.

“Ultimately those of us engaged in the effort to save someone’s life when they’re wracked with psychosis are helped most by the fact that psychotic people are, in some deep sense, desperately tired and looking for an excuse to give up,” DeBoer writes. And yeah, having gone through what instrument repair guy has every day for going on a year now, I’m surprised he’s even still standing. As he said:

This has been escalated to the point where I've been in almost constant fear for my life for way too long. I am out of options. This is covert. They need to make it look like an accident, like a violent crime, like I'm having a mental breakdown. None of those things are true. If anything happens to me, it is planned. Imagine living in a world where you're scared if you go into an ambulance you're not going to ever come out. … I'm in trouble.”

And look, I get it, I wouldn’t want to take meds either. That woman who got beat up trying to steal a car is medicated now. She told me the side-effects are rough and that it’s hard for her to give up her mania because that’s when she feels the best she’s ever felt. I also understand, as a lefty, that going to a psychiatrist or submitting yourself to the saccharine therapeutic culture and the professionalized industry of therapy can feel like a final capitulation to a deeply fucked up society that would rather make everyone feel okay about that fucked up society than give them the tools to actually change it. Just take your happy pills, you malcontent. I get it. But there is a line. There is a place that your mind can go to from which there is no deliverance, a place where you will kill someone, be killed by someone, kill yourself, or slowly die by living an unresting, hounded, wretched life. When your brain keeps you dangling in that dark place despite all the best efforts of those around you, the notion of preserving individual freedom no longer makes sense. Your brain has seen to it that you will not be free. In such cases there has to be a mechanism for treatment — a treatment which saves the life of the individual who is suffering and potentially the lives of those around them — that does not require the consent of a hijacked mind. There just has to be.

Bend your arms around me,
come let your love surround me again.

— “Winter’s Lament,” by St. Cinder

I hope he’s gonna be okay. The man needs help. Our society is ill-equipped to provide that help. And I just want my goddamn guitar back.

---