This latest trainwreck, and another thread in the Pit about some poor woman killing her child, to which I will not link, sparked a question in my skeleton brain.
Suppose I have been kidnapped by a schizophrenic, who believes that evil demonic forces are persecuting him. He has a gun, we are locked away somewhere, and he is going to sacrifice me at high noon if the mayor doesn’t agree to call off the demons that control City Hall.
I (obviously) would like to talk him out of sacrificing me. What would be the best approach to do this? Should I accept his delusions as real and attempt to convince him that not sacrificing me would be preferred by the demons, or challenge him on his convictions and try to argue him out of it? Or do I just change the subject and talk about how I want to live to see my daughter again, and/or show him pictures of my wife and try to humanize myself so he will pity me?
Or what?
I have been sort of in this situation, both with a very senile relative and back when I rode the city buses. There was one guy who was convinced the CIA was showing subliminal messages on his TV set to try to get him to commit suicide, and he always sat next to me. (Okay,I gave him a dollar or two once in a while.)
Any mental health workers or other medical types care to chime in with advice? How does one deal with the floridly insane, when escape is not an option.
The evil demonic persecutor? What does an evil demonic persecutor need with a gun?
I think you should argue with the evil demonic persecutors. If you convince them, the schizophrenic will probably go along with them. And the demon has the gun, after all.
I thought the point of subliminal messages was that you didn’t notice them. Maybe they were liminal messages.
Meanwhile, you’re sitting next to a guy who has been receiving messages telling him to commit suicide? What if his chosen method is by bomb on a bus?
Are you sure there was really a guy sitting next to you?
When I found out you weren’t really kidnapped by a schizophrenic, I closed this window & went back to Evony. I didn’t even read the rest of the OP. Was that wrong?
OK, I’m back. I would like to know some professional opinions on this as well.
I have no training, experience, or expertise that make this a worthwhile answer, but I’m bored.
If their delusions are that real to them, then their brain isn’t going to process arguments about how they’re just delusional. You’ll want to embrace their delusion and pick your battle on those terms. However, you’re pretty much screwed, because there’s no reason to think that, even if a “real” demon would find your argument persuasive, the imaginary one will. That’s kind of what it means to be crazy.
Anyhoo, my mother, who works on a mental health ward with occasionally violently psychotic folks says such folk will get pretty agitated when you confront them on their delusions. In your case agitated would probably be a bad thing. She usually tries to remain non-committal on whether their delusions are real or not, but I think you should just run with it and try and convince him that their demon overlord really wants them to let you go.
If we’re doing serious answers, mine can be found in the thread linked to in the OP, but it’s not materially different from what Cliffy and Simplicio are saying here. (More behind-the-scenes explanation for why, inside-the-schizzy-head stories and etc)
I thought the guy was trying to get away from the demons. I have no experience with mental illness, but I’m pretty sure that interacting with the demons in any way except to drive them away would be bad. The inconvenient thing is that he can sense the demons and you can’t. So he gets to decide if what you’re doing is helping or hurting him.
If he’s convinced that only the mayor can drive them away . . . well, maybe you can pretend to be the mayor. Agree to do anything he says if he’ll just take you to City Hall.
Do you have access to a phone? How big a city do you live in? I’d call mayor Nutter (realizing it might take a while to get through) and put him on the phone with my captor.
Or, I could try to talk my captor into giving me the gun. After all, what he really wants is for the demons to go away. If I can convince him that can happen some other way, he won’t kill me.
If truly desperate, I would try to get him to commit suicide. The average schizophrenic is far more likely to kill themselves than to commit murder. This man is obviously very near the edge. A gentle push and he’ll shoot himself rather than me.
You better learn how to be sincere really fast. He’ll recognize if you are not sincere. Don’t try to logic it, he’ll come up with an illogical response that satisfies him.
There are keys to his obsession that swirl around in his mind. Don’t try to intentionally confuse him, that will probably just make him angry.
And last and most important. If a schizophrenic tells you they are being persecuted by demons, they most emphatically, certainly, and really are. It doesn’t matter that they are emotional constructs that exist only in his mind.
Depending on what he’s doing you might try simply walking right out the front door. Tell him that regardless of what happens he’s not going to sacrifice you at noon, that he might let the demons make him do their dirty work, but that YOU certainly are not going to participate. You might get shot of course, I guess it depends on how fixated on the noon deadline he is, whether or not it has to happen, PRECISELY at noon.
Why is this question any different from how you would handle a non-schizophrenic captor? In that case, he might think he’s rationally advancing his self-interest or perhaps he’s out for a thrill kill (like a Leopold and Loeb). Do you try to persuade your captor on rational grounds or do you make your appeal a more emotional one? This dilemma does not seem very different to me from the dilemma you face with respect to the schizophrenic; it is only the socially-constructed fear of mental illness that leads you to think it adds a terrifying new dimension to the problem.
I suppose a passing remark like that needs some explanation.
This is the sort of perspective I was looking for - thanks.
Because I have more of a common basis with the non-schizophrenic. I can appeal to his self-interest (“You will get shot by the cops if you kill me, whereas if you let me go unharmed you can convince them it was a misunderstanding”.) Or “You want money? Hell, I can have $20,000 in twenty minutes. Here’s my account number.”
Whereas, with a schizophrenic, it is a lot harder to find common ground. I think I would be a lot more convincing arguing that I am worth more alive as a hostage than arguing that the demons are really telling him something different than they have been to date.
Consensus seems to be to play along with the delusion. With the guy who sat by me on the bus, I was tempted to do that, but mostly for entertainment and to have something to talk about. Would y’all say that this is generally the best approach when dealing with schizophrenics in a non-therapy context?
I hope this goes thru - the boards are being difficult again.
Do you think with a non delusional eveyday robber/kidnapper you will have better luck? What if he has already killed and he has nothing to lose? Do you still think you might talk him out of robbing/kidnapping/killing you?
My advice on anyone taking you hostage in an abandondend buliding is to do what your kidnapper says, wait for the cops to release that gas thing they do, and thank then profusely for only having a slight cough when it is all over.
I would expect so, yes. As mentioned, I believe I could understand, and therefore manipulate, the motives of someone who wanted money better than the motives of someone who thought it was demons.
Better than with a schizophrenic? Yes - I’m still worth more as a hostage, Or at least so I would attempt to convince him. What I am interested in is what motives to appeal to with a schizophrenic.
Do I (as seems to be the consensus) agree that it is demons?
What I guess I would try is something I did when my daughter was very young. She had seen a scary movie at her friend’s house, one for which she was way too young, and she couldn’t get to sleep because she was scared of the monsters. My wife tried to convince her there were no monsters, and it didn’t work. I then said, “Hold on - I will get some repellent” and went and put some rubbing alcohol on a piece of toilet paper and gave it to her. I then explained that alcohol was a clean smell, that monsters were dirty and that therefore they were scared of the clean smell and couldn’t come near her.
She was a little kid, and little kids sometimes use magical thinking. Plus the part of the brain (the rhinocephalon, IIRC) that processes smells is close to the limbic system, which processes emotions. Therefore an association between a smell and comfort is easy to create. (I think that was why my kidlets never wanted us to wash their comfort blankets.)
Maybe I would try something like that with a schizophrenic.
Wouldn’t there be some actual GQ-style answers to the OP in the field of police hostage negotiations? Or maybe FBI, I dunno, but the only cites I’d come up with are Denzel Washington quotes. Or better, Sam Jackson.
I think mswas’ point about learning to get sincere fast shouldn’t be overlooked. People with schizophrenia may not always be able to quite process or express their perceptions of people in a way that makes sense (even to them?), but from what I’ve read and heard from friends in the field, they can be highly perceptive and react badly to people fucking with them.
You can probably get away with being an ass to some poor schlub on the bus (but you might as well cheat at poker with blind kids, for the same level of “win”, plus you’d get money out of it), but I wouldn’t try that on someone waving a gun around.
There’s also the question of whether/how you would know the person’s diagnosis, and whether or not you want to know specifically about schizophrenia as opposed to some other condition that involves a break from reality. I realize the OP was inspired by the threads on schizophrenia, but the hypothetical described would apply (possibly better) to other forms of psychosis.
While the op, with its fantasy trope of the crazed violent schizophrenic, seems a poor way to ask for a serious answer, I will throw mine in.
You do not challenge someone’s delusion in a therapeutic setting nor do you validate it. You instead accept that the delusions are real to them and help them create coping strategies. Not so dissimilar to dealing with your daughter’s monster fears and the monster repellent. In that case you did not accept the monsters as real; you accepted the fears as real and gave her tools to cope with imaginary monsters perhaps even explicitly stating that they are imaginary monsters and this is imaginary monster repellent that works great on imaginary monsters.
I can answer something that someone I know very well once did. He met a fellow who seemed ordinary… except that halfway into the conversation he leaned in close and conspiratorially asked if my frend saw the demons, too.
Queue confusion. It did explain why that fellow didn’t have any frinds for very long.
Long story short, my friend taught him how to use the “Earth Forces” to raise wards and barriers. Not that my pal believed in it, but the crazy dude soon did. A month later, he had friends and even a girlfriend. Sure, he sometimes muttered vaguely about the earth power, but that wasn’t any odder than the girl down the block who talked about her crystals or what.