The postmortem on what went so wrong with the Covid response is ongoing. But significant analysis surrounds a psychological aspect: why so many people were fearfully convinced to go along with questionable and controversial measures and turned sometimes brutally against those who refused to comply. Today, I speak about that with Dr. Mark McDonald, psychiatrist and author of “United States of Fear, how America fell victim to a mass delusional psychosis.”
The following is a transcript of a report from “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
Watch the video by clicking the link at the end of the page.
Sharyl: How did America fall victim to a mass delusional psychosis?
Dr. McDonald: The weaponization of fear. Americans have become compliant. They’ve become adept at receiving signals to be afraid. And when groups and individuals consolidate their power and activate a national emergency and then offer a solution, which always involves giving up some form of freedom, Americans comply, and they will comply as long as they stay afraid.
Sharyl: Have you sensed or theorized who was behind that? Who was driving the fear? Was it a coordinated effort or something that just happened?
Dr. McDonald: I think what happened was a crime of opportunity. I’m not a conspiracy theorist in the sense that there’s a group of people in hood sitting in a cave somewhere outside of Davos planning the next a hundred years. And if they are, they’re not gonna be very successful. What I think happened was there was a confluence of opportunities among disparate groups who all had something to gain by instilling fear.
Sharyl: Do you think it’s possible that fear made us sicker? And by that, I mean we always hear things reduce our immunity. When your body is stressed or when certain things happen physiologically because you’re afraid, can that impact your immune system, and can that stand to make us sicker if we do get covid than we might have been?
Dr. McDonald: Absolutely. What fear does is induces in a chronic sense, a stress response. And stress does two things. It does something to the body, which as you say is largely speaking, lowering immunity, lowering your resistance to all forms of infection. And also, long-term disease like cancer. Cancer is very highly linked to stress. It also does something psychologically, which is one who is afraid. One who is in a state of fear all the time is constantly trying to control his environment. He develops obsessional thinking and compulsive behaviors. He limits his exposure to risk taking. He stops being productive. He basically consolidates himself into a small space, which is largely speaking his home or, or if at work, his home office.
And I think that ultimately is the goal here is control. Because when you have a consolidation of power, as we’ve seen politically and economically in the last two, three years, one group of people stands to benefit at the expense of everyone else when there’s an easy road to control the population. That’s why I think this happened and that’s why I think it’s continuing.
Sharyl: What is mass psychosis?
Dr. McDonald: And the way that I describe it is a moment in time now to some degree ongoing four years later, where an entire population all goes crazy at the same time. //
So a mass delusional psychosis from the way that I’m describing it and defining it in my book is, is really irrational self-harming, but groupthink response to a modest or minor problem. And unfortunately this, this issue, this movement that occurred in 2020 and moving forward, it’s the first time in the United States history in my lifetime anyway, that anything like this has happened. And I think it’s the first time because it’s the first time in the last two or three generations that we have had, America has had the ability to instill so quickly and so powerfully and so chronically a feeling of fear in the population.
Sharyl: I guess that was made possible in a way because of technology and the internet and so on, that couldn’t have happened 50 years ago.
Dr. McDonald: Exactly. I have something in my pocket called a smartphone that I believe is the primary driver of the psychosis of 2020, along with what we’re seeing in the youth population, which is a complete loss of socialization, obesity, anxiety, body dysmorphia in girls gaming, addiction in boys, and ultimately deaths by drug overdose, specifically fentanyl delivered to homes through apps like Snapchat as well as suicides among a lot of young girls. It’s wrecked the adult culture. It’s wrecked the child culture today. I tell parents, if there’s one thing that you wanna do to protect your children, take away their smartphone, do not allow them to have one at all until they’re 18 and they become an adult. I think that would solve many of the problems we have in our country.
Sharyl (on camera): There is a growing effort to remove or restrict access to cell phones by students in schools. At least eight states have put restrictions in place in addition to actions in other cities and districts across the country.
Watch video here.

Maybe more folks will realize that they’ve been programmed by an institutionalized system. The movie, “The Matrix” is perhaps the most significant film we’ve seen come out of the Hollywood machine in this lifetime. Many people use the “Red pill/Blue pill” analogy during coffee breaks. I believe that the so-called ‘division’ we’re witnessing in society is a result of a social-engineering pattern. Ms Attkisson–you reach a lot of people, will you consider broadcasting, or publishing a series on the history of “social-engineering?” The Tavistock Institute was created over 100 years ago…the mass formation psychosis we are currently witnessing has been cultivated over the last century. I’m somewhat optimistic that humankind will understand that Artificial Intelligence must be governed with ethical oversight and integrity. We may yet survive as a sentient species once we get past what Carl Sagan referred to as our, “Technological adolescence.”
My theory is the mass psychosis was linked to the fact the Age of Information had morphed into the Age of Disinformation. A bedrock had taken away and people felt very helpless ….who or what could they believe? Even though the digital revolution was still in its infancy, we had “truth” now at our fingertips. So we thought.
People around the world no longer had sufficient comfort knowing right from wrong from their religious traditions that they could rely on, so trust in the “government” was all that was left. They obeyed. Just like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan?
Crime of opportunity was Democrats weaponizing “covid” for 2020 election year gain. A very toxic mix.
Albert Camus certainly nailed these contradictory forces this in “The Plague” – 1950′. Also aa time of mass hysteria- Cold War, nuclear annihilation, and McCarthyism.
Track “covid hysteria ” back to the great US toilet paper hoarding frenzy first, and then tract the mass hysteria attachment finally to “covid”. Tony Fauci’s instant cult like status even though he knowingly lied about “covid” was very much part of the perverse expression that carried the partisan political taint – TDS ws tightly woven into the mass hysteria after four years of TDS saturating the popular media.
This is EXACTLY the analysis I have arrived at, looking back over the events during the Great Covid Dumpster Fire. Dr. McDonald calls it a “confluence of opportunity.” An Internet poster I follow and appreciate, Bad Cat, refers to it as “the low energy path.” Either way, fear drove us to accept stupid approaches. And, for the record, I do NOT believe that we’ll be better next time.
Was Matt Damon already in cahoot with Gates and Fauci when he produced the movie Contagion?
Mass hysteria followed it almost to the letter. No movie got more mention in the early days of “covid”.
It bears repeating… “I have something in my pocket called a smartphone that I believe is the primary driver of the psychosis of 2020…. It’s wrecked the adult culture. It’s wrecked the child culture today.”
Fear… OF DEATH. Let’s not forget that people were dropping like flies, that the morgues were full and food refrigerator trucks were being used to keep the bodies. Most importantly, Covid did not discriminate. A healthy 24 y. o. pharmacy tech who had just waited on me the week before, died in less than 48 hours after getting Covid. FEAR OF DEATH!