"Mass Formation Psychosis?" A Psychologist's Take

A speculative sociocultural theory lights up the internet. The media goes straight to panic mode.

In his recent appearance on the Joe Rogan show, the physician-scientist Robert Malone, who owns a patent for mRNA technology, stirred a hornet’s nest when he explained how people became so docile toward the government’s COVID policies. According to Malone, an obscure academic theory, “mass formation psychosis,” illuminates why so many people suddenly misplaced their minds. As would be expected, the media warmly welcomed this helpful suggestion and then swiftly initiated the cancellation process.

Dutifully, boringly, and predictably, the Associated Press press-ganged two hapless reporters to “fact-check” the theory of mass formation psychosis (MFP), as if there were any facts to check. Other take downs, too numerous to mention, followed in train.

Along the way, academic psychologists were conscripted to the cause, including Jay Van Bavel, who asserted that it “doesn't exist as a real academic concept” and is, in fact, “pseudoscience.” Alas, Van Bavel is barking up the wrong tree. Mass formation psychosis is a sociocultural theory, something Slavoj Zizek might cook up (and, in fact, has: see his fascinating discussion of Jaws). For this reason, MFP stands outside the scope of Van Bavel’s investigations or, for that matter, mine. (I study group behavior on occasion.) Nevertheless, Van Bavel treats it as conventional psychological theorizing, and the logic of his dismissal appears to be:

a) All scientific theories are known to Van Bavel; b) Van Bavel doesn’t know this theory; c) Ergo, mass formation psychosis is not a scientific theory!

At least, Van Bavel has some psychological expertise. Among the more idiotic rejoinders to MFP was this one from, of all outlets, CNET, which noted that mass formation psychosis isn’t in the DSM-5. It takes a simpleton to point out that a theory of the masses isn’t a DSM diagnosis. (NB: No psychopathology researcher thinks the DSM is a fact check on truth or an adequate guide to mental illness.)

Is There a Mass Delusion Right Now?

HOWEVER, before we consider whether the theory or something like it is “a real academic concept,” let’s consider the far more important question that has been remarkably ignored: Is there a phenomenon for MFP to explain? In other words, do we have an example of mass delusion right now? (I prefer delusion to psychosis.)

Even the detractors, Van Bavel included, would grant that history is replete with examples of the masses falling prey to bizarre, impossible, and morally reprehensible beliefs. A short list would include: the Inquisition; the Salem Witch Trials; the “red scare” of the 1950s; and, worse of all, the Holocaust. (I am not suggesting that what is happening now is analogous to the Holocaust but that the masses can be persuaded, through mysterious means, to accept utterly odious ideas).

Is this contemporary moment a parallel to the past? Have large numbers of people taken leave of their senses?

The COVID vaccine has now been extensively used, and the objective data have raised extremely troubling questions about its effectiveness, its safety, and its implementation. For examples:

• Poor efficacy. Vaccine efficacy is short-lived, and there is zero evidence that the vaccine has had a net benefit in saving lives. Pfizer’s own trial found that more people died in the vaccine than the placebo arm (see here for the 6-month update that shows more deaths among the vaccinated). In fact, excess all-cause deaths are trending higher this year than last in the US and across Europe, and these deaths are synchronized with the vaccine rollout (see a preprint here). Moreover, given their short-lived and limited efficacy, the vaccines are spectacularly ill-suited to containing the pandemic.

• High risk profile. The COVID vaccines have a risk profile that is exponentially greater than any other vaccine ever used. The VAERs database has logged more adverse effects than all vaccines combined. I myself developed serious neurological symptoms after my second Moderna shot, which persist to this day. (I’ll describe these in detail in another post.)

• Unknown long term risks. The potential long-term effects are—by definition—unknown. Worse, the vaccine trials were designed to unsure they could not be discovered because the placebo arm was converted to vaccine only two months after the trial began.

• Failure to consider risk-benefit. The vaccines have a remarkably high incidence of myocarditis among young men 18 - 24, and this group stands to be harmed at a population level from vaccination, even in the most optimistic scenarios, because COVID poses close to zero risk to this age group. Administering the vaccine to children is stunningly reprehensible, a clear violation of the Hippocratic Oath. See my previous post on Maddie de Garay. A fantastically sophisticated review of the harms of the Pfizer vaccine is here.

• Vaccine mandates. If the vaccines work—i.e., protect the vaccinated through sterilizing protection—then a mandate for their administration is superfluous. Anyone who refuses will only harm themselves. Forced medical procedures have a dark history for anyone who cares to remember. In fact, I am old enough to remember when mandates were disavowed by every Democratic politician (last summer). Given their temporary efficacy, high risk of adverse effects, variable risk benefit, and unknown long term harms, mandates are a disgraceful abridgement of fundamental human rights of bodily autonomy and medical ethics, at variance with every moral code ever proposed.

If we are pursuing manifestly irrational policies, if our actions are inconsistent with fundamentally desirable human outcomes, and if these divergences between policy and outcome can be validated by appeals to empirical data, discoverable by any actor, then we are, in fact, living in a world characterized by delusion and false belief.

So I am with Malone in his claim that the masses are deluded, that something is, as the saying goes, Rotten in the State of Denmark. See here for University of Chicago and Stanford students calling to attention to um, the absence of clothes on our collective emperors.

Where do these delusions come from?

Perhaps the only insight of Foucault’s worth preserving is that power can determine “truth.” We know where the power is: government, corporations, media, big tech, and the academy. And we know how they are deploying it: a coercion campaign without parallel in recent human history.

How are they getting away with it?

Theories on Mass Delusions Have Been Around for a Long Time

This is where Mass Formation Psychosis comes in. The author of it, Mattias Desmet, a psychology professor at the University of Ghent, proposes that people are vulnerable to manipulation on a grand scale when certain psychological conditions are met (feelings of isolation, meaninglessness, anxiety, frustration, and aggression).

Under such circumstances, according to the theory, people are vulnerable to simple explanations and simple solutions (the vaccine; and the mandate that people take it). These explanations will edge out all others, as “the field of attention gets narrower until it only contains the part of reality that is indicated by the narrative and people lose their capacity to take into account the other aspects of reality.”

Does this constitute psychosis? Not in a narrow sense, because psychosis is experienced by an individual, not a group. But the “psychosis” Desmet describes is exactly consistent with the mind of the mob, a condition recognized as far back as Aristotle and amply documented across centuries. In 1852, Charles McKay wrote “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” (my italics). Erich Fromm, among the most famous psychologists of the 20th century , wrote two books (“Escape from Freedom” and “Anatomy of Human Destructiveness”) about the ways people are enslaved by ideas and become cogs in the wheel of totalitarianism. These books have different emphases—sometimes they are ground up (mob mentality) and sometimes they are top down (totalitarian)—but they agree that such movements are fundamentally irrational and thus, metaphorically, “psychosis.”

Alas, the term “psychosis” has become a convenient punching bag for the foot soldiers of the media, the apparatchiks toiling, cortados by their side, at coffee shops in the formerly great citadels of this country, tweeting, posting, clicking, and liking, all in the service of. . .

A vaccine that isn’t very effective and has done demonstrable harm to untold numbers of people.

If that doesn’t make Malone’s and Desmet’s point, I don’t know what would.