# The CIA Poisoned My Dog: Two Stories About Paranoid Delusions and Damage Control

*Cross-posted from my substack,* [*https://neverthesamerivertwice.substack.com*](https://neverthesamerivertwice.substack.com)*.*

The whole family was home around christmas time. We were hanging out in the kitchen after dinner. My brother started asking me about national security law. He’d graduated from a well ranked law school about six months before, and I was about six months away from graduating from a slightly higher ranked law school, and both our parents are lawyers, so law was not an unusual topic in our house.

Maybe twenty feet away the family dog, Biscuit, was attempting to climb the stairs. He started having a seizure. This had never happened before, and it was a bit scary. So my mother, my brother, and I piled into the car to take Biscuit to the vet. Unfortunately, the laws of physics stop for no dog, so we had to stop for gas. And while the gas was flowing, my brother expressed his frustration that they had interrupted our conversation. They? The CIA of course, that secretive government agency we had driven past every Sunday on our way to church as children. They didn’t want me to share what I knew about national security law. But the conversation was interrupted by Biscuit’s seizure, what could the CIA have to do with that? It must have been some kind of poison. They can deliver poison through patches that dissolve into the skin and therefore cannot be found. This all made so much sense to him. And it put his questions about national security law in a whole new light. That was when I realized my brother was crazy.

Over the next few years I learned a lot from having a crazy brother.

I learned that the CIA was trying to recruit my brother, because it needed more gay people to diversify its workforce.

I learned that the CIA sends people messages by arranging for there to be particular numbers of cars of different colors parked on the street.

I learned that when a psychotic person drives down to the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, they do not let him in, but also do not arrest him.

I learned that the Secret Service protects foreign embassies in DC, and that it is good to be able to tell them that you do not own a gun that your brother could take and shoot up an embassy with.

I learned that Adderall, taken by a person without ADHD but with a particular personality, can contribute to a psychotic break. I learned to ask what other medications might contribute to a psychotic break under the right circumstances.

I learned that paranoid delusions can be remarkably complex, and remarkably disconnected from reality, while also being a natural outgrowth of a person's personality and past experiences. Unlike literal illnesses, they aren’t separate from the person.

I learned that you can love a person but be unable to live with them.

I learned that despite what trespassing laws say, you cannot get cops to remove a person from a house they have been sleeping in for a while, even where there is no deed or lease with their name on it.

I learned that cops will only take a psychotic person to a psychiatric institution if they are “a danger to themselves or others”, which in practice seems to mean only making very direct and unqualified threats.

I learned that suicide threats are not always carried out.

I learned that a smart psychotic person is often able to lie and present as normal enough when interacting with cops and psychiatrists.

I learned that such a smart psychotic person can get themselves released from a psychiatric institution in a matter of days, without any real treatment or progress.

I learned that antipsychotic medications have unpleasant side effects that can make people unwilling to get on or stay on them. Once a brain malfunctions that badly, without treatment, it never gets fixed.

I learned that a psychotic person will inevitably get kicked out of every place they live - fancy apartments, cheap houses, an SUV that breaks down in a McDonalds parking lot.

I learned that you cannot stop a psychotic person from hurting everyone around them. All you can do, absent forced institutionalization and/or medication, is to get them out of your life and limit the damage.

These lessons came in handy recently. About a month ago a new short term guest who I will call David[^u4f08mv0i38] arrived at my group house, Andromeda. From the beginning something seemed a little off about him, but not anything specific that I could point to. Andromeda exists in a broader community that has a lot of weirdos and skews autistic, and I love that, and David didn’t seem that far off from that baseline. For the next few weeks he took up a position on the couch in the upstairs living room, studying programming or psychology or maybe both in the hope of getting a job in the field. He mostly kept to himself, and while there were minor annoyances that always come with a new housemate, such as a very abnormal sleep schedule, nothing dramatic happened.

Then I got a message from David about another housemate, Edward, which threatened: “If he does the standard intra masculine competition thing of randomly tapping and shoving me he’s getting maced. Same if he boxes me into a corner and chews me out. If he tries to wrestle me he is getting stabbed.” David then went on about dominance and medications in a way I won’t even try to do justice to, except to note that he mentioned modafinil, which can cause delusions, and is used to treat narcolepsy, which can also cause delusions. Finally, he accused Edward of moving his phone while he slept and pouring out his hair products.

My first reaction was that this was crazy, but I was thinking crazy in the colloquial sense, not the psychotic sense. I asked David for more facts. I got silence. Rereading it the realization that it might be psychosis set it. But I was probably overreacting. I’ve seen psychosis before, but only the one case of my brother, and I’m not trained in mental health more generally, maybe I’m overindexing on psychosis because of my brother. To a person with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, right?

So I sent the message to a friend for a second opinion. She brought up the possibility of psychosis on her own. I wasn’t overindexing.

At this point two things were clear. Firstly, I had to get David out of Andromeda. Secondly, I should do what I could to get David help. That evening I spoke with David’s father, and the following morning with his mother. They were disappointed, but not surprised, that he was being kicked out. This had happened before. They weren’t surprised by the suggestion of psychosis either. I’ve been on the other side of some of these calls, been told by people in my brother’s life that he might be psychotic. Yeah, I already knew.

With the mother’s endorsement, I called the local police department and asked them to send someone over to help deal with getting David out. When the officers arrived I talked to them in a public parking garage near the house. I showed them David’s message. They didn’t think the message met the standard of “a danger to himself or others.” The threat to stab the housemate was phrased as a conditional, so in their view, he wasn’t a threat. I was disappointed by the unreasonably high bar they were applying, but not surprised. The cops in Virginia weren’t much better, and this was California, with its very particular politics.

When the cops and I returned to the house, we couldn’t find David. He had snuck out. Most of his stuff was gone. Mission accomplished I guess. So the cops left. Almost immediately David returned to retrieve his food from the kitchen. While doing this he made another seemingly-crazy comment, and threatened to sue me, but ultimately left again quickly. That was the last I saw or heard from him. Hopefully mission accomplished this time.

Edward, who had been the target of the threat, was very rattled. We had several conversations about it over the next couple of days. I explained to Edward that it wasn’t about him, that these kinds of people exist and form a significant part of the long-term homeless population, that in a society that won’t institutionalize these people, they inevitably move through the world forever harming everyone around them, and all you can do is get them out of your life and minimize the damage. I explained to Edward that David was probably already focused on whatever his next problem was rather than on us, and that if David was still focused on one of us, it was much more likely to be me, as I was the one who kicked him out. I don’t know if it helped.  
 

I relearned how shocking and upsetting it can be to encounter psychosis for the first time. I’d gotten too used to it.  
  
I also learned how to reprogram the electronic deadbolt on our front door.

[^u4f08mv0i38]: As always, all names, and maybe some genders, have been changed. If you are in the local community and want to know the name for your own safety, reach out to me directly.