Conspiracy theories are a mental health crisis

This story is part of a two-part series exploring the intersection between disinformation and mental health. To learn about the toll of being targeted by racist disinformation, read our companion piece.

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Every day, people who spend time online face a deluge of conspiracy theories, misinformation, and disinformation. Plenty of them move along, clicking past outlandish or false content that’s designed to lure them in. Some, however, become ensnared for reasons experts don’t fully understand. Thanks to algorithms, like the ones that drew many into QAnon, people quickly slip into dark corners of the internet and find a community of believers, or even zealots, who swear they’ve discovered hidden truths and forbidden knowledge.

These people might rightfully distrust government authorities, find political polarization invigorating, and search for information that confirms their own views, all of which could make them more vulnerable to falsehoods. Conventional wisdom says media literacy, fact-checking, and critical thinking skills are the best weapons against those impulses. Yet this approach rests on the dangerous assumption that people’s emotional and psychological well-being has little bearing on their vulnerability to far-fetched ideas, elaborate lies, and cunning propaganda. In fact, recent research suggests that their mental health can influence what they’re willing to believe.

Studies have shown that conspiracy theories appeal to people with unmet psychological needs. They crave knowledge, desire safety and security, and need to maintain positive self-esteem. Conspiracy theories, which may sometimes be true, help explain the unknown, giving people a deep sense of satisfaction. That relief, however, can be temporary. Past research shows conspiracy theories are associated with anxiety, social isolation, and negative emotions. Now a new wave of research conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic suggests a plausible connection between uncertainty, anxiety, and depression and an increased likelihood of believing conspiracy theories.

That confidence became an antidote to the misery of not knowing what might come next.

Perhaps with so much beyond understanding, people looked for answers wherever such revelations might be found. Insight was plentiful on YouTube, Facebook, Telegram, Twitter, and other media platforms where grifters, hucksters, and conspiracy theorists peddled the truth as they saw it to people who wanted what few could offer: certainty. That confidence became an antidote to the misery of not knowing what might come next.

Many of those drawn into communities that trafficked in conspiracy theories also found misinformation and disinformation. The former is shared without malicious intent. The latter, according to disinformation scholar Dr. Alice Marwick, Ph.D., comprises false information, distorted stereotypes, and mischaracterizations as part of a campaign of persuasion. Disinformation can include conspiracy theories presented as fact, and those who share disinformation typically refuse to admit when they’re wrong.

People who immerse themselves in this swamp of “polluted information,” particularly those with a deep attachment to QAnon, have anecdotally expressed preoccupation with and distress over solving riddles and clues, waiting anxiously for predictions to come true, fractured relationships with loved ones over their beliefs, and increased isolation. If their mental health hadn’t been poor prior to their involvement in these online communities, it seemed to decline the deeper they got. Their friends and family have noticed. In one subreddit dedicated to people who’ve lost a friend or family member to QAnon, posters frequently despair over losing their loved one to what they often describe as a cult.

The complex relationship between mental health and false information has far-reaching effects yet it’s routinely overlooked. The field of research is relatively new and underfunded. There’s also legitimate concern about pathologizing certain beliefs or views. Yet, it’s becoming increasingly clear that without efforts to meaningfully address people’s mental health needs, before or after they become deeply involved in conspiracy theories and disinformation, we’ll make little progress toward defeating the dishonesty that pollutes our dialogue and discourse.

“It was a perfect storm”

When Leila Hay discovered QAnon at the beginning of the pandemic, the British college student was already experiencing anxiety. She’d applied to receive counseling the month prior, but a year passed before she was moved off the waitlist.

Stuck at home during lockdown, she found her first Q-related conspiracy theory on Facebook. That led her to a vast collection of alarming conspiracy theories and disinformation based on the premise that there’s a cabal of Hollywood and political elites who physically and sexually abuse young children. For QAnon believers, former President Donald Trump is the world’s savior because he’s prophesied to ultimately oust the evil-doers from power. Hay says she quickly became absorbed in investigating these claims. Stressed and isolated from loved ones, she fell deeper into the abyss.

“Because my brain was already used to convincing me that the worst was going to happen (health problems, failure, poverty, etc), it is not surprising to think that it would also convince me that the world was a much darker place,” Hay, 20, wrote in an email to Mashable. “There is not much worse than believing the world is run by cannibalistic, satanic, blood-drinking paedophiles who are responsible for looking after the healthcare and education of our children. It made me want to protect the ‘victims,’ although I knew there was no way to do that.”

Her obsession with the conspiracy theories subsumed her other interests, like music, films, and reading. She spent so much time looking at QAnon content online that she experienced frequent headaches and used eye drops to relieve dryness.

Hay, who has shared her story widely with media outlets and posted about it anonymously on Reddit, eventually decided to abandon QAnon in August 2020 after finding a Twitter thread debunking many of Q’s claims and predictions. She began listening to the QAnon Anonymous podcast, which dissects the movement’s theories, and pursued private counseling for anxiety. Hay says her therapist didn’t know about QAnon, which created challenges for her treatment. She switched therapists and now feels the emotion regulation skills she’s learning will prevent her from falling prey to conspiracy theories in the future.

“I think the biggest problem is that many therapists do not understand how conspiracy theories can affect mental health, as that was a struggle for me,” Hay wrote. “When you genuinely believe the world is being controlled by Satan worshipping paedophiles, you need support to process the beliefs you have programmed yourself with, and that is a traumatic thing to go through.”

Social and clinical psychologist Dr. Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D., normally studies terrorists and radicalization. But with the emergence of QAnon, she’s investigated why people are drawn to the community and its set of beliefs. Moskalenko, who is a research fellow at Georgia State’s Evidence-Based Cybersecurity Group, reviewed media interviews and court records related to roughly two dozen known QAnon believers charged with committing a crime, like transporting weapons to stop a supposed child sex-trafficking ring. What Moskalenko found surprised her: Many of those who’d committed a crime had a history of mental illness.

She wasn’t the only one who noticed this pattern. In February, researchers for the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism published a report revealing that more than two-thirds of the 31 QAnon adherents who’d been charged with a crime before or after the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C., experienced severe mental health conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. Many of the women in the sample became involved in QAnon after learning their child had been physically or sexually abused by a romantic partner or family member.

“Some people who already had mental health issues probably were especially vulnerable to these rabbit hole-like social environments online.”

In general, the majority of people with mental illness aren’t violent. Instead, they’re more likely to be victims of violence. The high prevalence of mental illness amongst QAnon believers charged with a crime struck Moskalenko as unusual.

She says that terrorists are rarely diagnosed with mental illness and typically exhibit traits like focus, strategic thinking, and planning and execution, which help them accomplish complex or violent aims. Moskalenko didn’t expect that people who’d behaved like domestic terrorists would also be grappling with severe mental illness. She suspects the pressures of the pandemic, including uncertainty, anxiety, fear, and isolation, pushed people closer toward embracing a set of false or improbable views that offered certainty to believers. Moskalenko also thinks trauma can serve as a trigger for radicalization.

“Some people who already had mental health issues probably were especially vulnerable to these rabbit hole-like social environments online into which they were squeezed during pandemic isolation,” says Moskalenko, who is also the co-author of Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon. “It was a perfect storm that dragged a lot of people into this swampy landscape of conspiracy theories where there is this online community that accepts you and welcomes your creativity.”

Moskalenko, says that to solve the problem of QAnon, we must address America’s mental health crisis.

“Coping by conspiracy”

Dr. Joanne Miller, Ph.D., an expert in political psychology, sees a similar challenge. Last summer, the Canadian Journal of Political Science published Miller’s analysis of an online survey about conspiracy theories she conducted with 3,019 U.S. adults. Miller found that nearly half of respondents believed that COVID-19 was definitely or probably a Chinese bioweapon and that Bill Gates definitely or probably had plans to inject a tracking device along with the COVID-19 vaccine. Both conspiracy theories have dominated online discussion of the pandemic.

Miller, a professor in the departments of political science and international relations and psychological and brain sciences at the University of Delaware, unsurprisingly found that people who are predisposed to conspiratorial thinking were more likely to endorse individual theories. But those who expressed greater personal uncertainty were also more inclined to believe COVID-19 conspiracy theories. Political affiliation played a role as well: Self-identified Republicans were more likely to be believers. Those three variables — conspiratorial thinking, personal uncertainty, and party identification — all interacted to affect conspiracy theory beliefs.

On the other hand, those with higher emotional resilience, or the self-perceived ability to bounce back quickly from hard times and setbacks, were less likely to endorse a number of conspiracy theories.

Miller believes that while media interventions like fact-checking are important, they overlook the motivation behind why people turn to conspiracy theories and disinformation. She describes the dynamic as “coping by conspiracy.”

“Figuring out more effective ways to regain control when they’re feeling like they’re losing control or feeling uncertain is as important as the media literacy side,” says Miller.

Someone, for example, might be persuaded against believing the popular conspiracy theory that 5G towers spread COVID-19, but if they’re still looking for answers about the pandemic’s origins and don’t find satisfying explanations, another falsehood or theory is always waiting to provide the comfort of certainty.

Two other surveys about emotional well-being and conspiracy theories conducted during the pandemic yielded intriguing results. One survey of 797 participants in the U.S. and Canada found that half of respondents believed at least one major conspiracy theory about COVID-19, like that the virus is a bioweapon and a way to push vaccines. A second follow-up survey of the original participants revealed that those conspiracy beliefs were associated with greater anxiety.

The more negative someone felt about themselves and others, the more likely they were to believe conspiracy theories.

The researchers, who published their findings in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, also measured how participants felt about themselves. Psychologists refer to these views as a “self-schema” — a framework that guides how people see the world. The more negative someone felt about themselves and others, the more likely they were to believe conspiracy theories about COVID-19. Positive self-schemas, however, were protective against those conspiracy beliefs. People with more positive views of themselves, who might believe they’re a good or successful person, could have an easier time seeing their own virtues even when going through a difficult time.

“There is a great deal of media coverage regarding the role of conspiracy theories in reducing likelihood of vaccination or adherence with social distancing requirements, however, it’s important to also remember that believing conspiracy theories also has a negative impact on the person believing them,” Talia Leibovitz, the study’s lead author and a researcher in the University of Toronto’s department of psychology, wrote in an email.

There’s still much more to understand about the relationship between conspiracy beliefs, false information, and mental health. Published recently in Frontiers in Psychology, a separate large-scale survey of 8,806 people in eight different countries mostly found no association between anxiety and conspiracy theories. The researchers, who surveyed respondents last summer, found that feelings of depression were more closely linked with those views across countries. Conspiracy theories presented to respondents included believing that the pharmaceutical industry is involved in the spread of coronavirus and that there’s a link between 5G technology and the coronavirus. Other factors influenced conspiracy beliefs as well, including digital media consumption and trust in information sources.

David De Coninck, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Sociological Research at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, said in an email that anxiety and depression are closely related. He added that it’s possible anxiety played a role in people’s conspiracy theory beliefs, but that depression overrode that effect.

De Coninck and his co-authors described conspiracy theorizing as a “feature of the mind” that shapes “certainty and control in times of uncertainty and stress.” In that sense, they wrote, people with a tendency to make negative associations and inferences may be far more vulnerable to the lure of conspiracy theories.

Disinformation as a “wellness issue”

Dr. Whitney Phillips, Ph.D., co-author of You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape, has watched with dismay as the speed at which lies spread online quickened. She’s argued that facts won’t save us. Phillips says we must begin thinking of the falsehoods that proliferate online as not just an information issue, but also as a “wellness issue” that affects everyone, some disproportionately so. The vulnerable and marginalized groups who become the target of racist or otherwise bigoted conspiracy theories and disinformation, like people of Asian descent who’ve been verbally or physically attacked during the pandemic, pay an especially steep price.

Phillips, an assistant professor in the department of communication and rhetorical studies at Syracuse University, believes that media literacy and critical thinking approaches must incorporate mental health and well-being techniques and strategies. She’s particularly interested in the role mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) could play in stemming the spread of falsehoods. Though it hasn’t been tested as an intervention against disinformation, Phillips thinks there’s a strong possibility that MBSR could decrease reactive sharing, since the technique emphasizes mindfulness and emotional and physical awareness.

Like Joanne Miller, the political psychologist at University of Delaware, Phillips sees resiliency skills as critical in the fight against disinformation. In Miller’s opinion, this work could be done at an early age, building on the social-emotional learning happening in many schools around the country. That curriculum teaches students how to recognize and manage their emotions, solve problems, and relate positively to others. These are also skills that mental health providers can share with adult clients.

There is no playbook for integrating mental health into our understanding of disinformation and conspiracy theories.

“It’s a pretty significant impact to wonder how many people have been radicalized,” says Phillips, describing a shared sense of paranoia and suspicion. “It’s not just the people who believe or friends and family of believers, it’s everyone who’s wondering how many walk amongst our midst. You cannot have a balanced, healthy, holistic sense of security when there are so many questions like that floating around.”

The mental health field seems ill-equipped to recognize the threat that conspiracy theories and disinformation represent. Of course, the phenomena have roots in complex problems, including increased political polarization and the way social media platforms are designed. Scholars at the University of North Carolina persuasively argue that disinformation, which has long existed in the form of media, state, and political propaganda, is a “key way in which whiteness in the United States has been reinforced and reproduced, in addition to heteronormativity and class privilege.”

There is no playbook for integrating mental health into our understanding of disinformation and conspiracy theories. Yet it’s clearly time to rethink what our collective vulnerability to disinformation and conspiracy theories would look like if people learned coping and resilience skills early in life, had access to quality mental health treatment when they needed it, and could draw on community support during times of hardship and uncertainty.

Reducing economic insecurity through policies that guarantee income or a living wage, housing, and health insurance could decrease the anxiety that makes someone more prone to believing lies and falsehoods that provide security they can’t find elsewhere. Those trying to preserve a fragile relationship with a loved one who’s consumed by conspiracy theories or disinformation can remain curious about their views for as long as they can bear it. That openness might be their path out of darkness.

There’s no doubt that we’re living in a feverish time. Now we must imagine what it’ll take to bring people back to themselves, confident in their ability to move forward in an unpredictable world without believing lies designed to destroy the bonds that hold us together.

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If you want to talk to someone or are experiencing suicidal thoughts, Crisis Text Line provides free, confidential support 24/7. Text CRISIS to 741741 to be connected to a crisis counselor. Contact the NAMI HelpLine at 1-800-950-NAMI, Monday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m. ET, or email [email protected]. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. Here is a list of international resources.