Mass surveillance has made it basically impossible to treat paranoia in a clinical setting.
March 24, 2026
Original Paper
The Unfalsifiable Delusion: How Mass Surveillance Infrastructure Creates Disparate Impact on People with Paranoia-Spectrum Conditions
SocArXiv · cfqwz_v1
The Takeaway
The standard psychiatric intervention for persecutory delusions involves 'reality testing'—showing the patient evidence that they aren't being monitored. Because modern surveillance infrastructure is now actually ubiquitous, a patient's belief that they are being tracked is often factually true, breaking the foundational logic of the therapy.
From the abstract
Reality testing is a core cognitive-behavioral intervention for persecutory delusions: the clinician helps the patient examine evidence for the belief that they are being monitored, the patient discovers the belief is unfounded, and cognitive reframing occurs. This paper argues that mass surveillance infrastructure deployed by U.S. government agencies and their private contractors has eliminated the foundational precondition for this intervention by making persecutory beliefs factually accurate