Hey babe, take a walk on the paranoid side

you are under suveillance
Originally uploaded by found_drama.

In the past, I've suffered some horrifying bouts of depression with psychotic features, as they like to say in the psychiatric business. These involved, among other things, episodes of delusional paranoia. By delusional, of course, I mean they were unfounded; not supported by objective fact.

BG, likewise, sometimes suffers from this malady, and one of his various psychiatric labels over the years has been paranoid schizophrenia. In my opinion, some of these paranoid tendencies are ingrained in his personality, and passed down from a family traditon of seeing threats where none actually exist. For example, during the Nixon administration, BG's dad threw away any photos of BG with long hair. BG hadn't kept any as he moved from place to place, and now I'll never have the satisfaction of seeing what BG the hippie looked like back in the day.

The way I see it, one of the features of delusional paranoia is based on the erronious assumption that anyone gives enough of a shit about you to persecute you. Major mental illness can produce this effect, in part because in your psychosis you perceive things only from your own self-centered viewpont. I'm not talking here about garden-variety egotism, but a symptom that can bring untold distress to the sufferer.

However, as they say, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that someone isn't out to get you.

In my last post, I mentioned that I was having a bit of blogger's block. Though some of it was due to my habitual attempt to make my posts as coherent and succinct as possible, I think that finding out about Blogger's deletion of certain blogs without warning or explanation actually made me hesitate to post the piece at all. The fact that affected bloggers also found it difficult, if not impossible, to reach a real person at Blogger to try to get the situation straighened out distressed me even more. To make matters worse, on the evening in question I'd watched a TV program about the horrifyingly repressive North Korean regime that chilled me to the bone.

My potential post involved a tongue in cheek exploration of how bloggers try to generate more hits, or visits. I was going to discuss provocative technorati tags and linking to high traffic sites. But I put that aside in part because I realized that banned blogs may have been mistakenly labeled as splogs (spam blogs)--perhaps via some automated scanning software. I admit this is quite a stretch, but now I find that I am, for the first time, second guessing myself on my own blog.

In addition, I'd been coming across examples of internet censorship virtually from the moment I began blogging. The one characteristic that disturbed me the most was that websites could literally disappear overnight without a trace--much in the same way any individual seen as a threat to a repressive government can vanish in the night.

In conclusion, I don't know if I will post on blog censorship or not. I don't know if I will do my little sardonic post on tags and linkage or not.

Perhaps I am being ridiculous here, and you are free to mock me or tell me to up my meds. But the fact that I feel it necessary to think twice about posting on any topic is, perhaps, the most disturbing thing of all.