BUCK: We’re joined now by psychologist Mark McDonald. He is the author of United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis. Dr. McDonald, thanks for being with us.
DR. MCDONALD: Thank you. Just a quick clarification. I am a medical doctor so I’m a psychiatrist, not a psychologist.
BUCK: Oh. Well, there we go. I’m glad we called you doctor ’cause that would definitely be true.
DR. MCDONALD: (laughs) Yeah.
BUCK: So, Dr. McDonald, tell us, sir, what is a mass delusional psychosis, and how did this happen?
And we know this from just looking out of our windows in our homes and our cars and seeing people walking, driving, biking, by themselves, wearing one, two, three masks, face shields, gloves, shutting down schools for children, who really have no business being at home because their job is to be at school and they’re completely safe at school.
Shutting down businesses, people not wanting to go into elevators with other people for over a year and a half. This is not rational thinking, and it’s not one person. It’s not 20. It’s an entire country of people all doing it at the same time, and that’s why I called it mass delusional psychosis.
CLAY: Dr. McDonald, is this more of an issue, in your experience, for children or adults? Who has a harder time grappling with these rules and what the impact might be going ahead?
DR. MCDONALD: Well, the children would have been fine if we had just left them alone.
CLAY: Yeah.
DR. MCDONALD: But children take their cues from adults, and they also take their cues from other kids, and when adults tell children, “It is too scary and too dangerous for you to go to your friend’s house for a sleepover,” or “too dangerous for you to walk to school by yourself without wearing a bunch of masks on your face,” and, “it’s too dangerous for you to visit grandma because she might die if you breathe on her,” that wrecks a child’s psychology.
That makes a child believe that his simple presence, the regular activities of his day-to-day life — going to school, visiting with friends, seeing grandma — are now no longer safe or appropriate. And then what happens two years later, we tell them, “Guess what? Everything’s fine now! You don’t have to do any of that.”
The child is completely confused. He’s now been conditioned to think that he’s a danger to society. He’s not gonna be able to let that go. Witness today. First day back at school in Los Angeles County, all the children were told, “You don’t have to wear masks indoors.” The front-page article, L.A. Times says, “No more masks in schools, but 85% of all children continue to wear them.” Why is that?
BUCK: Outrageous. We’re talking to psychiatrist Mark McDonald. He’s the author of United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis. Dr. McDonald, excuse us here ’cause obviously we don’t have medical backgrounds. I’m wondering, though, is this in the psychiatric literature, this notion after mace delusional psychosis?
For a time the term that was being used among some of the media was “mass formation psychosis.” Is this well studied? I mean, where could people learn more about this? Is this talked about in psychiatric circles? I’m just wondering what the clinical diagnosis of this would be.
But the word “formation” really just means psychosis, according to this Belgian psychologist. So mass formation psychosis is just mass psychosis psychosis, which is just repeating the same word twice. But it means the same thing that I mean when I say “mass delusional psychosis,” and the expression, the idea has been around for quite a long time.
This isn’t the first time that this has happened. Look at the Salem Witch Trials. That was a mass delusional psychosis. In Europe, many women were executed in almost every village in multiple countries throughout Europe because they were called witches — and this was insanity on a social level, on a citywide level. It happened in Northern Europe during the 1600s with the tulip craze.
Everybody thought tulips were suddenly worth millions of dollars, and they invested in them, only to see themselves bankrupted six months later when the market crashed. People get whipped up into frenzies all the time throughout history in different countries. What’s different about this is that it happened around the entire world. It wasn’t just one town, one city, one state, one country. It was worldwide: Rich, poor, First World, Second World, Third World. This is what makes it unique. This is what makes it different from past crises and mass delusional hysterias.
CLAY: Dr. McDonald, I’m fascinated by that, the historical cogency you just gave us, ’cause sometimes the emotions of the current day can distract and not make people see things rationally. You just mentioned the tulip craze. That market crashed making people aware, “Oh, tulips really didn’t have the value that we ascribed to them,” right?
DR. MCDONALD: (laughing) That’s right.
CLAY: You could see the same thing happened president subprime mortgage crisis in this country on some level, the great moment in the Michael Lewis book and also the movie where the strippers have multiple homes in Florida, and that’s when he — at least in the movie — has a lightbulb moment and says, “Oh, my gosh. We’re totally in the grips all of delusion as it pertains to housing values.”
DR. MCDONALD: That’s right.
CLAY: There is crash in those examples where people can say, “Oh, we got this wrong!” There’s a tangible acknowledgment of the wrongness.
DR. MCDONALD: Yes.
CLAY: Maybe you can see where I’m going here. Is there any hope of a tangible acknowledgment of the wrongness as it pertains to our response with covid — and if you don’t get that, how do you pull people out of the grips of this mass delusion?
Witness that we’ve moved on from one crisis, which was covid, to the next crisis, which is Ukraine. Why? Nothing changed except the politics. It is a crisis-distraction strategy, and it is intentional so that Americans and those around the world do not have to look and feel and act on the suffering that they witness in their day-to-day lives: Economic collapse, open borders, drug addictions, fentanyl overdoses, anxiety, depression, suicide, failing schools, crime.
All of that gets put on the back burner during a state of crisis. So, no, they will not acknowledge it. The only way for us to move forward and get out of this is for individuals — the parents, the friends, the families, people who have taken hold of and been taken hold of fear become essentially addicted to fear — start to acknowledge that they themselves are hurting each other and themselves by holding onto the fear.
And that’s why I’m writing a second book right now called Freedom from Fear: A 12Sstep Guide to Individual and National Recovery, modeled after AA and Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. We cannot look to the top to correct themselves. We have to look to each other and build up from the bottom to get over this fear addiction and hopefully, hopefully block the next crisis from taking over our lives.
BUCK: Psychiatrist Mark McDonald. He has a book out, United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis and another one on the way. And, Doc, please come back and talk to us when that one’s ready for the folks to hear about it.
DR. MCDONALD: I’d love to. Hope to get it out by Easter, perhaps May.
BUCK: All right. Thanks so much.
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