Stop Your Mind from Broadcasting Fake News

We who experience anxiety, depression and self-hatred know fake news better than anyone. At a recent rally in Washington DC, Catholic students from Kentucky’s Covington High School encountered Native American elder Nathan Phillips. Things occurred. Words were said. Spectators captured images. Within minutes, the media went wild. Divergent factions accused each other of bigotry, harassment, violently punishable crimes — and the ultimate modern-day offense: spreading fake news. As now occurs so often, amidst a maelstrom of ever-more-adjustible pictures and words, real-life events become hazy accounts, transferred from ear to ear and eye to eye as in the childhood-party game of telephone, each whisper ever more subjective and ever more blurred, on purpose or by accident, competitively or for fun. This is a perilous position from which to assess a complicated world. The shrinking of old media with its few but allegedly omniscient Voices of Authority, the ascent in its place of interactive social media and viral video, have shattered the traditional notion of truth. The very idea of fake news — that so-called facts are spliced, contrived, confused, mistakenly or calculatedly, to trick or tribalize us or sweep us into a swirling tide of rage or fear which seems to confirm our beliefs — is terrifying. It breeds ignorance and hatred and a suffocating sense of impotence. We who experience anxiety, depression and self-hatred know fake news better than anyone. Ou...
Source: World of Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Brain and Behavior Publishers Self-Esteem Self-Help Spirituality & Health anxiety Depression Fake News Self-Hatred Source Type: blogs