Source for the below excerpts are at: www.nytimes.com...
The sites are drawing the concern of mental health professionals and the
interest of researchers in psychology and psychiatry. Although many Internet groups that offer peer support are considered helpful to the mentally ill, some experts say Web sites that amplify reports of mind control and group stalking represent a dark side of social networking. They may reinforce the troubled thinking of the mentally ill and impede treatment.
Dr. Ralph Hoffman, a psychiatry professor at Yale who studies delusions,
said a growing number of his research subjects have told him of visiting
mind-control sites, and finding in them confirmation of their own
experiences.
"The views of these belief systems are like a shark that has to be
constantly fed," Dr. Hoffman said. "If you don't feed the delusion, sooner
or later it will die out or diminish on its own accord. The key thing is
that it needs to be repetitively reinforced."
...
For people who regularly visit and write on message boards on the
mind-control sites, the idea that others would describe the sites as
promoting delusional and psychotic thinking is simply evidence of a cover-up
of the truth.
The article looks at so called "proof of gang stalking" websites that we have seen on ATS before, like gangstalkingworld.com. The results of the research on this are pretty clear:
Vaughan Bell, a British psychologist who has researched the effect of the
Internet on mental illness, first began tracking sites with reports of mind
control in 2004. In 2006 he published a study concluding that there was an
extensive Internet community around such beliefs, and he called 10 sites he
studied "likely psychotic sites."
It also points out that its impossible to diagnose people as psychotic over the internet alone, which is a good point. And its also too early to figure out whether the presence of this sort of "group therapy" for those suffering from this will be positive or negative.
