A Decade-by-Decade Chronology of Prominent Psychotic Fantasy Themes Since 1900

All right, today we’re going to dive into something that is just deeply fascinating and honestly pretty misunderstood. We’re talking about delusions and we’re going to see how these incredibly personal, intense stories that people experience during psychosis, well, they aren’t random at all. Turns out they’re like a mirror reflecting the world that all of us are living in.

So, let me just start with a kind of wild question. What if your entire life was a reality TV show? I mean, really, what if hidden cameras were capturing every single thing you do, all for the entertainment of some massive unseen audience? It sounds like a movie plot, I know, but for some people, this belief is terrifyingly real. Let’s get into it.

Yeah, this is a real thing. It even has a name coined back in the 2010s, The Truman Show Delusion. You know, named right after that Jim Carrey movie. It’s such a modern fear, isn’t it? Born out of our culture of reality TV and surveillance everywhere. And it perfectly, brilliantly sets up the main idea we’re going to unpack today. So, here it is, the absolute core of it all. The content of delusions changes with the times. The deep psychological wiring might be ancient, but the specific stories, who the bad guys are, what tools they use, they get a complete reskin for each new generation. They basically become a cultural archive of what scares us the most.

Now, you might be thinking this is a pretty recent thing. you know, something that started with the internet. But nope, not even close. If you look back over the last hundred years or so, you see this exact same pattern repeating itself over and over and over again. I mean, just look at this progression. Back in the 1910s, right in the middle of World War I, delusions were packed with spies and fears of being poisoned. Fast forward to the 1950s, the Cold War is raging, and suddenly the fear is all about communist brainwashing. Then you jump to the 80s. Personal tech is taking off and you get these fantasies of implanted microchips and mind control via microwaves. And today, well, the scripts often feature things like 5G signals and pandemic conspiracies. You see, the core fear of being persecuted, that’s the constant. It’s just the villain and their gadgets that get an upgrade.

Okay, to really really get our heads around this, let’s zoom in on one of the biggest delusional themes of our time, the fear of being hacked. This is the perfect case study for how that classic timeless fear of being controlled gets a 21st century update. The evolution here is just it’s remarkable. So, the very first clinically recorded internet delusion pops up in 1997. It was this general belief of being controlled by this new kind of spooky thing called the internet. Just two years later, it gets more specific. People start talking about internet bugs or being able to surf the web with their minds. By the 2010s, of course, we all have smartphones, and the delusions zero in on our personal devices. And now, today, the simple phrase, “My phone is hacked,” has become this sort of ready-made script, a go-to explanation for those feelings of being watched and controlled from the outside.

Okay, this slide right here, this is where it all just clicks into place. On the left, you’ve got something called the influencing machine, a delusion first described way back in 1919. It was this idea that faraway enemies were using mysterious rays to control a person’s body and inject thoughts into their head. And on the right, the modern hacked delusion. The structure is basically identical. You’ve got remote enemies, invisible signals, a hostile takeover of your personal world. The only thing that’s changed is the vocabulary. We just swapped out beams and rays for network signals and Wi-Fi.

So, you have to wonder, right, where did this blueprint, this whole idea of being controlled by technology even come from? Well, to find that answer, we’ve got to go back even farther to the turn of the 20th century. We need to meet the man who, you could argue, wrote the original source code for all of this. This is Daniel Paul Schreber. He was a German judge who in 1903 published maybe the most famous memoir of psychosis ever written. And in it, he described this unbelievably detailed, almost baroque system of control. Listen to his words. God’s rays act upon my nerves, broadcasting meanings through a nerve language. See, this wasn’t some vague feeling of being watched. This was a complex, almost scientific system of remote influence that he had it all mapped out.

And when you really break it down, Schreber’s system has all the pieces of a modern hacking story. You’ve got divine rays, that’s your external signal. You’ve got a nerve language, that’s the transmission protocol. Soul murder, I mean, what is that if not a hostile takeover of the self, and forced transformation, that sounds an awful lot like having your whole system rewritten by an outside force? It’s wild. It’s a total information and control network imagined decades before anyone even dreamed of the digital age.

And so Schreber’s incredibly detailed worldview. It became the foundational prototype, the original text for all of this. His experience gave us the template for that influencing machine, which then provided the template for delusions about radio and then television, satellites, computers, and yep, now our smartphones. The operating logic is still recognizably Schreberian.

So let’s pull all these threads together. What’s the big takeaway? Why does digging through all this history actually matter for us today? Well, it matters because it shows us a couple of really profound things about how our inner world connect to the outer world we all build together. It really boils down to two constants in over a century of massive change. First, our culture provides the raw material. Whatever the anxieties of the day are, war, new diseases, scary new tech, that’s what becomes the building blocks for these stories. And second, while that raw material changes, the fundamental fears, they’re timeless. The fear of being watched, of losing control, of being replaced. That core fear just gets a new user interface for every generation. The terror of being controlled is ancient. The belief that it’s happening through your Wi-Fi is brand new.

And that leaves us with one last big question to think about. If these incredibly private personal experiences really are a kind of distorted reflection of our shared reality, a mirror to our collective anxieties, what’s that mirror going to show us next? What new technologies and future fears are just waiting around the corner to write the next chapter in this very human story?