Is paranoia increasing?

Daniel Freeman, Jason Freeman

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Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman speculate on the factors that could be behind a '21st-century fear'

On the evening of 15 February 1996, the 147,000-tonne tanker Sea Empress ran aground on rocks at the entrance to Milford Haven harbour in south-west Wales. Over the next week, 72,000 tonnes of crude oil and 360 tonnes of heavy fuel oil seeped from the wreck into the sea, contaminating 200 kilometres of the Welsh coastline, much of it part of the exceptionally beautiful and ecologically diverse Pembrokeshire Coast National Park. More than 50,000 birds were killed or injured.
The devastating effects of the Sea Empress disaster weren’t confined, however, to the flora and fauna of the national park. In the wake of the oil spill, local people found themselves experiencing a range of health problems, including headaches, nausea and skin irritation (Lyons et al., 1999). And yet when the accounts are examined closely, something curious emerges. The first symptoms were reported as early as the first day of the incident; at that stage very little oil had escaped from the wrecked tanker. Whatever was causing these first headaches and feelings of nausea, it wasn’t the Sea Empress. Indeed, people living on stretches of the coast that were entirely unaffected by the spill also complained of symptoms.
How do we explain physical symptoms without an obvious physical cause? In the case of the Sea Empress disaster, it’s likely that they were the direct result of anxiety. It’s an established formula. Take one catastrophe, add extensive media coverage, and watch public anxiety grow.
Think back, for example, to the anthrax scares that swept the US in September and October 2001. During these weeks, letters containing anthrax spores were sent to a number of senators and media organisations. Five people died and a further 17 were also infected. With anxiety in the US already ratcheted to unprecedented levels by the September 11 attacks, hundreds of people soon began reporting that they too had been the victims of anthrax poisoning, with many complaining of symptoms. In one case, a teacher and student reported minor chemical burns after opening a letter containing some type of powder. Subsequent analysis revealed that the envelope contained no such powder. All in all, there were more than 2300 such false alarms. 
The responses to the Sea Empress oil spill and the 2001 anthrax scares point up something fascinating about the way we reason. Put simply, the more often we hear about something, and the more emotive that event is, the greater its impact on us. We’re susceptible, suggestible, suspicious creatures, easily moved by the appearance of things, and much less influenced by the way things actually are. 
This has a direct bearing on the question we ask: Is paranoia increasing? Because, although we don’t – and now won’t – have the sort of historical data that would allow us to produce a conclusive answer, in Paranoia: The 21st Century Fear (Freeman & Freeman, 2008) we set out the grounds for believing that paranoia is indeed on the rise. And one of these is related to precisely the kind of reasoning that the Sea Empress disaster, and the anthrax scares, so compellingly illustrate.

Reasoning and the media

Paranoia is the unfounded fear that other people want to harm us. What we understand now is that there is a connection between experiences as apparently diverse as mild suspiciousness and severe delusions. These are not unrelated psychological phenomena; they are in fact the opposite ends of a spectrum of paranoia, with their similarities far outweighing their more obvious differences. Overestimation of risk from others is central to all of these experiences of paranoia.