Timothy Kerns ·

Content Warning: The following post contains detailed descriptions of personal experiences with psychosis, paranoia, mental illness, involuntary commitment, and related trauma. Please read with care.

I have schizoaffective disorder and was diagnosed in my early thirties.

I held these persecutory and delusional beliefs for probably eight years, losing everything as a result of a fog of paranoid psychosis. The ideas themselves eventually amounted almost to religious beliefs and, in a way, became ingrained in my identity. Letting go was hard.

If you are a T.I., you should do in-depth research into what delusions are, how they manifest, and how they tie into psychosis. I do not mean that you should research gang stalking. In fact, I am telling you to do exactly the opposite. Stop researching gang stalking and start researching persecutory delusions, psychosis, paranoia, and how the mind can construct and reinforce false beliefs.

I know many of the people reading this are intelligent and curious. I am not here to make fun of you. Believing these things does not mean you are stupid. Despite what may seem to be happening in reality, I know what you are going through. If you are a new T.I., realize that the results of these beliefs can destroy your life. You may wake up one day and realize all the time you let slip through your fingers is gone.

I am here to tell you there is hope.

I was never a fan of the psychiatric establishment. In fact, I had disdain for it. Part of my delusions included beliefs that I was being used for psychiatric research. Any and every mental health professional I encountered was an enemy. In hindsight, I took a problem the size of a grain of sand and built it into a bunker with razor wire.

One of the biggest problems with living your life in these hypervigilant states all the time is that psychosis tends to creep up slowly and quietly until it is all you know. At that point, you can’t make sense of your environment, and you are unaware that this is the case. You may not be 100% psychotic all the time, but many of you reading this may no longer have your bearings on reality.

I didn’t.

Coming to terms with the fact that I had a psychiatric illness was a tough pill to swallow. I didn’t do so willfully. I fought every psychiatrist tooth and nail the whole way. Half the time, I refused to talk to them at all. I went through involuntary commitment after involuntary commitment. It was psych ward after psych ward. I put my entire family through hell to the point they were done with me.

The strange thing is that simply getting better for a while was not enough to convince me that I had been delusional.

I went on and off antipsychotic medication many times. The medication could reduce the psychosis, but I didn’t interpret that improvement as evidence that my beliefs had been wrong. If the experiences stopped, I simply thought the stalking had stopped. When I stopped taking the medication and the experiences eventually returned, I thought the stalking had started again.

The underlying explanation remained intact.

That is an important distinction. A change in what I was experiencing did not automatically change my understanding of what I had experienced.

What I would like to tell anyone reading this is to protect your mind from letting that paranoia-inducing garbage in. With the internet, you have volumes of some of the most sick and twisted material available, and plenty of it is eloquently written. You are not stupid for believing it. The person who wrote it may have been sick, not dumb. Intelligence does not make a person immune to delusion.

Don’t read it. Any of it.

For me, consuming that material was like feeding my disorder steroids. Every new article, website, video, or conversation gave me another piece of information that could be incorporated into the belief system. Instead of testing the belief, I was constantly supplying it with new explanations.

The truth is that neither medication nor religion, by themselves, did much for me. What eventually mattered was realizing how alone I was and how precious time is. I had to accept the mess I had made in my life and move on down the road.

The delusions were real to me. What I was seeing with my own eyes and senses seemed very real at the time. That is one of the things people who have never experienced psychosis can have difficulty understanding. I was not walking around thinking, “I am going to believe something crazy today.” I believed I was responding rationally to things that were actually happening around me.

In hindsight, the lunacy of it all is mind-boggling. Due to constant paranoia and relentless hypervigilance, I was probably literally a case of around-the-clock walking psychosis.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO KNOW HOW I GOT BETTER, I DID THE FOLLOWING:

• I completely quit visiting every single gang-stalking and Targeted Individual website and didn’t read one more piece of that material online.

• I cut myself off from the online network that continually reinforced those beliefs. I didn’t have any real friends at the time. All I had was an online network of people suffering from many of the same beliefs, something that had become akin to a digital cult. I had no one of flesh and blood to talk to about it.

• I learned everything I could about psychiatry.

• I learned everything I could about psychiatric disorders.

• Most importantly, I learned everything I could about delusions and psychosis—what they are, how they form, how they are maintained, and how a person can be experiencing them without knowing it.

• I learned everything I could about psychiatric medications.

• I took a medication known as an antipsychotic, and this time I stayed on it.

• I started sleeping soundly again without all that garbage constantly kicking around in my head.

• I gave myself time.

That last one turned out to be enormously important.

I want to talk for a second about psychiatric medication because my experience with it was more complicated than simply taking a pill and suddenly realizing I had been wrong.

Psychiatric medications can have some really nasty side effects. Will I have to take them my whole life? According to my doctor, no. But medication became an important part of how I eventually got better.

I had taken antipsychotics before. I had improved before. What I had not done was remain stable long enough to completely reevaluate the belief system I had constructed over approximately eight years.

Medication could pull me out of psychosis. But being out of psychosis was not necessarily the same thing as understanding that I had been psychotic.

That second part took considerably longer.

For years, I had accumulated what I considered evidence. There were people I had seen, things people had said, strange encounters, coincidences, reactions from strangers, things involving my neighbors, and countless other experiences. Those events did not disappear from my memory when the medication started working.

I still needed an explanation for them.

For a long time, the explanation remained “gang stalking.”

Eventually, however, I stayed on medication for more than a year. I was sleeping. I wasn’t constantly feeding my mind conspiracy material. The paranoia quieted down. And at the same time, I began learning everything I could about what a delusion actually is.

I mean the nuts and bolts of it.

I learned about psychosis, persecutory delusions, paranoia, psychiatric disorders, impaired insight, and how the mind can take real observations and build false conclusions around them.

That distinction became extremely important to me.

A person really could have looked at me.

A car really could have driven past me twice.

A neighbor really could have behaved strangely.

A coincidence really could have happened.

The mistake was not necessarily in every individual thing I saw or experienced. The mistake was in the enormous explanatory structure I had constructed to connect those events together.

Eventually, I had enough distance from the psychosis and enough understanding of delusions to turn the same critical thinking I had spent years directing toward the outside world onto my own theory.

Instead of continuing to ask, “Who is doing this to me?” I began asking a different question:

“What explanation best accounts for everything that has happened to me?”

For the first time, “I am experiencing persecutory delusions” was not something a psychiatrist was telling me. It was a hypothesis I could examine myself. And I examined it.

I looked backward at years of my life. I looked at what happened when I was taking medication and what happened when I wasn’t. I looked at the similarities between my experiences and the experiences of people with known psychotic disorders. I looked at how wildly different the explanations within the Targeted Individual community could be while the underlying experiences of persecution remained remarkably similar.

I learned how delusions work.

I learned how psychosis works.

I learned how paranoia works.

And eventually I obtained enough evidence to overwhelmingly draw the conclusion myself that being delusional was the only logical explanation left.

That was the switch.

Nobody argued me into it. No psychiatrist finally found the magical sentence that convinced me. My family couldn’t convince me. Being involuntarily committed couldn’t convince me. Even medication, by itself, had not convinced me.

I had to understand why I had been wrong.

Once I understood that, I could go back through years of supposed evidence and see it differently.

This is why I say that the medication was not what fixed me. I did. But I don’t mean that the medication was unimportant. Quite the opposite. The medication gave me the sustained stability necessary to finally do the work that I had been incapable of doing while psychotic.

It gave me the opportunity to reason my way out.

Medication could help quiet the psychosis. It could give me sleep. It could reduce the paranoia and give my mind some breathing room.

But it could not sit down and examine eight years of beliefs for me.

I had to do that part myself.

Once I did, there was, in fact, no man behind the curtain.

All of this started in my life with a seed: a convincing article or two, too many coincidences, and experiences I couldn’t explain. I took those seeds and watered and nourished them with more and more conspiracy, eventually growing them into giant trees.

And once those trees were there, everything could grow around them.

Contradictory evidence could be explained away. People who disagreed with me simply didn’t understand what was happening—or worse, could themselves become suspicious. Mental health professionals became part of the problem. Medication reducing the symptoms meant the stalking had temporarily stopped. The symptoms returning meant the stalkers had returned.

I had constructed a belief that could explain almost anything.

And a belief that can explain absolutely anything becomes almost impossible to disprove.

That is the trap.

When I finally got my head right, I did damage control and realized how much damage there actually was. I ended up homeless and had snapped out of much of it by the time I ended up on the street.

I will tell you, these ideas are rampant in the homeless community.

Why are they rampant?

I think at least part of the reason is brutally simple: people who become consumed by these beliefs can eventually lose everything.

You stop trusting people.

You destroy relationships.

You become suspicious of employers, neighbors, doctors, friends, police, strangers, and sometimes your own family. You spend enormous amounts of time trying to understand or document what you believe is being done to you. You withdraw from ordinary life. Your world becomes smaller and smaller while the conspiracy becomes larger and larger.

Eventually, there may not be much left.

That was the hardest part of getting better.

Realizing that nobody was stalking me did not magically return the years I had lost. It didn’t repair my relationships. It didn’t give me my home back. It didn’t erase the things I had done while psychotic.

I had to wake up in the wreckage and accept that the world had not done this to me.

My illness had.

There is something incredibly painful about realizing that an enemy you spent years fighting never existed in the way you believed it did. But there is also something incredibly liberating about it.

Because if there is no enormous network of people secretly controlling your life, then your life belongs to you again.

That is what I want anyone who identifies as a Targeted Individual and is reading this to understand.

I am not telling you that you are stupid.

I am not laughing at you.

I am not telling you that the fear isn’t real.

I know the fear is real.

I know how convincing the evidence can seem when you are inside it. I know what it is like to believe that everyone else simply cannot see what is obvious to you.

What I am asking you to do is something much smaller:

Consider the possibility that you could be wrong.

Don’t just research evidence supporting what you already believe. Learn what persecutory delusions actually are. Learn what psychosis looks like from the inside. Learn about paranoia, hypervigilance, impaired insight, ideas of reference, delusions of reference, and understand the ways the human mind finds patterns and explanations.

Talk honestly with a qualified mental health professional. You do not have to walk through the door already agreeing with them. I certainly didn’t.

Then give yourself time.

You do not have to surrender your intelligence or your skepticism.

Use them.

Turn them toward the belief itself.

Ask what evidence would have to exist for you to conclude that you were mistaken. Ask whether your theory can ever actually be disproved. Ask whether there is another explanation that accounts for your experiences without requiring hundreds of assumptions about the intentions and coordination of other people.

I lost approximately eight years before I was finally able to do that.

You don’t have to.

Was this worth your time?

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Absolutely not!!!

WILL MYERS

Your post is misleading and destructive endlessly for the TIs. Your attempt to make the TIs accept the gang stalking as a norm and masochistic enjoyment of the pain. F you, take a flying hop.

Gil · Aug 31

Fbi , cia , nsa all have gangstalking programs for about 50 years , the tech has patents that you can read about!! Whistleblowers have given their statements about being targeted themselves!

Will Myers

Snakes, rogue social scientists, have developed highly sophisticated surveillance devices to accurately monitor targeted individuals (TI). The snakes are supported by the FBI, CIA, and NSA by backdooring private information about a TI to the snakes at the fusion centers to be distributed to select gang stalkers to assault the TI, thereby destroying the TI’s life. ZERSETSUNG: the destruction of the TI’s inner mind is the present program directed upon TIs who are a social experiment to control their thought-life and predict their movements. Control the mind, they control everything – hyper-communism.