Americans are in ‘delusional psychosis’ and policing each other, psychiatri

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COVID-19: Americans are in ‘delusional psychosis’ and policing each other, psychiatrist warns
‘We don’t need a police force. We don’t need a secret Stasi to go after the neighbor that isn’t wearing his mask on a park bench. We have families who are willing to do that.’

Mark McDonald  - The Epoch Times / YouTube

November 28, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — America is on the verge of being “lost” because many of its citizens are suffering from a “delusional psychosis” and so fearful that they are turning on each other to enforce “nonsensical” coronavirus restrictions, a California psychiatrist has warned.
“We don’t need a police force. We don’t need a secret Stasi to go after the neighbor that isn’t wearing his mask on a park bench. We have families who are willing to do that,” Dr. Mark McDonald said last month during a summit on the virus.
“We have office workers [who] will come by and mace you if you are not wearing a mask, and no one will come to your rescue. In fact, they’ll probably applaud it.”

A child and adolescent psychiatrist in private practice in West Los Angeles. Dr. Mark McDonald made his remarks during the virtual Truth Over Fear Summit organized by Catholic broadcaster Patrick Coffin.

The “driving force of the coronavirus pandemic and the hysteria” around it is fear, McDonald said at the summit. This fear has now “grown and become so entrenched that it has reached a state of what I would call delusional psychosis. A delusion is a fixed false belief that is contrary to reality,” he added.

“Fear has become a new virtue. Never before in the history of this country have we told people that fear is good,” or to “settle into” those fears and allow them “to control and constrain your life,” said McDonald, who spoke at the American Front Line Doctors White Coat Summits in July and October.

Moreover, Americans “who are either afraid, or who have been fed lies and misinformation for months now, have grown to not only feel afraid, but also to believe that what they are being told is true, which is primarily that all of us are at equal risk of catching a virus and dying from it,” McDonald said.

“This is demonstrably untrue. It is a lie, in fact. And we’ve known that it’s a lie for about six months, and yet people have come to believe it.” While there was “a lot of infection” from the coronavirus, there was “very, very little death or hospitalization outside of very specific populations,” McDonald said.

“Less than one percent of the population accounts for over 90 percent of all the deaths,” which occur in people “over age 70, mostly over age 80, with at least two and a half to three comorbidities, according to the CDC,” he added.

“Other than that group of people, we really are not at risk of hospitalization or death in any meaningful way from this virus, certainly less than we are of standard influenza.” Most disturbingly, the pandemic “hysteria” has reached the stage of “going beyond fear, going beyond the crazy itself, to what I would call group control,” he said.

As a result, Americans are policing themselves to such an extent that governments have “dialed down” enforcement of ongoing lockdowns and restrictions by “multiple notches,” he observed.

He related personal incidents as examples.

During a recent flight on Delta Airlines, a “furious” flight attendant “castigated me” for drinking water for more than three minutes, and continued to “hound” him throughout the flight, McDonald related.

When the plane reached its destination, McDonald was “escorted off” and interviewed by a station manager. Two weeks later, he received a letter from Delta banning him from flights “in perpetuity,” or until the airline withdrew its mask mandate.

Moreover, McDonald was later told by the person he was traveling with that “all the passengers erupted into applause” after he was escorted off the plane, because “their anxiety was relieved by me being punished for not appropriately wearing the mask as requested, as demanded.”

During another flight, McDonald went to the galley for some water, and an attendant on her break offered to get him some, but was berated by an on-duty flight attendant for not wearing a mask. “This colleague attacking colleague, passenger attacking passenger” is a “type of behavior I’ve never, ever seen before. I was stunned,” McDonald said.

“So the end result of this: what appears to me is a country which is using its own citizens as a de facto police force, very similar to communist China, that has a social point system in place where neighbor informs on neighbor, family informs on family,” he said.

“This has a terribly damaging effect on our society.”

He said that while misinformation is a root cause of the pandemic hysteria, Americans are also at fault for their “laziness” about educating themselves.

When the pandemic was first declared, McDonald had “patience” with people because they were “confused” by all the conflicting information, but his sympathy has run out.

“There is readily available information on all platforms of the Internet, social media that any reasonably intelligent and literate person can find and evaluate and critically analyze,” he said.

So widespread and so rooted is this delusional psychosis that “when I leave my home or leave my office every day, I have to prepare myself for the inevitable experience of what I would call the ‘outdoor insane asylum,’” McDonald said.

The experience “reminds me of my time that I spent in residency where I would go through a locked unit door, the door shut behind me, and I’d have to remind myself that anyone not wearing a badge behind that door is crazy,” added McDonald.

“Now I have to do the same when I’m out in public, because my assumption is that any person that I run into is insane.”

McDonald also warned things could get much worse.

“With a positive outcome in the election, with the removal of those who wish to destroy the country and the election of those who wish to preserve it, we have a fighting chance, but we need a virtuous populace as well, not just a virtuous governing body,” McDonald said at the summit, which took place a few days before the election.

“We need a people who believe in and cherish freedom as a virtue, rather than fear. Never before in the history of this country has fear been enshrined as a virtue. If it stays this way and we don’t address it and redress it, we are lost.”