The End is Nigh

August 31, 2013 10:11 AM

Could you recommend books about the history of apocalyptic thinking? I am especially interested in any academic analyses about how apocalyptic thinking relates to or has related to conceptions of mental illness. I'm not necessarily looking for dense dissertations on the subject, but something reasonably footnoted would be nice. Any opinions or anecdotes about tendency towards apocalyptic thinking and how it relates to mental illness are also welcome.
posted by garuda to Society & Culture (9 answers total)

I enjoyed eugen weber's take.
posted by bruceo at 10:23 AM on August 31, 2013 [1 favorite]

In Conrad’s stage model, there is often a prodromal delusional mood prior to the onset of the delusions. This may last for days, months, or even years.7,8 During this period, the patient experiences an increasingly oppressive tension, “a feeling of nonfinality” or expectation. The individual describes that something is “in the air” but is unable to say what has changed. Although the experience may be varied, the subject experiences a marked change of “emotional–motivational” state. At first, this is associated with the most salient experiences but eventually spreads to pervade the patient’s entire experiential field. The patient may feel not only excitement, “intoxicated” anticipation, but also suspiciousness, fear, depressive inhibition, guilt, a feeling of separation from others, and often a combination of these. She or he may perform abrupt, seemingly meaningless actions.

cite
posted by phrontist at 10:36 AM on August 31, 2013

For big picture approaches in addition to Weber, see Bernard McGinn's Continuum History of Apocalypticism and Frederic Baumgartner's Longing for the End.
posted by thomas j wise at 11:18 AM on August 31, 2013

The Paranoid Style in American Politics might prove useful to you:

The paranoid spokesman, sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization... he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.[1]

posted by jamjam at 12:15 PM on August 31, 2013

For a historical look at some of the societal pressures, Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium is a foundational text, although it's more interested in movements than individuals.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:16 PM on August 31, 2013 [1 favorite]

This is quite tangential, but Robert Glenn Howard studies religion and apocalyptic belief from a communications perspective. His book Digital Jesus talks about how the Internet comes into play, and there might be some interesting stuff in there in terms of how content creators have been able to reinforce these beliefs using techniques they know will appeal to susceptible readers.

This is interesting to consider when thinking about a friend of ours who has schizophrenia. His delusions manifested right around the time of 9/11 and involved thinking that he saw Middle Eastern men all over town, as if they were trying to follow him. And they WERE all over town: he worked for a pizza delivery place run by a couple of Iranian guys. (Who, by all accounts, were very nice.) His delusions just worked overtime in his head to make logical connections between actual things that he noticed.

So I can see pretty easily how "signs" of any type could easily be turned into strong belief.
posted by Madamina at 1:20 PM on August 31, 2013

I think Metafilter favorite When Prophecy Fails might be relevant.
posted by wittgenstein at 5:26 PM on August 31, 2013

This is more toward the "historical" side rather than the "mental illness" side, but the book "The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium," has a chapter on (whether there was any) millenial/apocalyptic fever as the year 1000 approached. Given the time period, extant written sources are few, but there's some indication that there was indeed some millenial fever at the time.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 5:40 PM on August 31, 2013

It's been decades since I read it, but I remember enjoying Adam Parfrey's Apocalypse Culture.
posted by The corpse in the library at 1:57 PM on September 3, 2013