How do you convince someone to get help when their friends all say they're fine? From time to time I think about how certain illnesses must be very difficult to treat because the sufferer's actual perceptions are skewed. For instance, how do you convince someone to seek treatment if they are under a paranoid delusion that they know too much and the establishment wants to put them on drugs to dull their minds? But imagine how much harder it would be to get help for this person if their entire set of friends and family also thought they were perfectly all right.
Take Witnesses, for example. They are fearful of the world around them, some to a neurotic degree that borders on genuine paranoia. If a JW is committedly absorbing the information they are taught, then they believe that the secret, invisible ruler of the entire world is personally out to get them. He or his minions watch them, observing their body's vital signs to find a weakness when they see something forbidden that they secretly desire. If this unseen enemy can't find a weakness, then he may attack them physically.
The JW believes that they can ward off this evil by spending hours each week performing certain rituals: sitting in a certain building, knocking on doors, and reading the same material over and over. This cleanses them of an invisible impurity, "sinfulness", that their body naturally accumulates over time and will eventually kill them. What's more, they believe that this world is essentially unreal, like a bad dream they will eventually awake from. Additionally, the world is full of nonbelievers who hide what they are really like, and who may collectively turn on them at any time. Even believers should be avoided if they seem like they may turn out to have an intangible, contagious condition known as "spiritual weakness".
Try to put aside your personal familiarity with the religion and let the above description sink in. Would not an objective bystander label this as delusional behavior?
But can you convince them that they need help? Of course not! Why? Because the society they're in -- their belief system, their superiors (elders, etc.), their friends, and their believing family members -- tell them that they're not the problem, the world is. So you end up with a group of people who enable each others' anxiety disorders and delusions. What's more, attempts to persuade them to think outside their box also fall under their paranoid expectations that the Devil will use other people to try to get at them.
What ends up happening is that the individual JW's identity becomes dependent on the group. He/she cannot imagine not being a part of the group. Thus they reject large amounts of contrary information and any association with contrary people -- solely for the purpose of staying in the group. The sense of belonging becomes its own raison d'etre even if the original cause for joining the group is forgotten; it leads to a vicious circle where the further the JW pushes away from the world, the more incompatible he becomes with it, thus becoming more dependent on his ingroup.
No matter where we're at in life, we should all ask ourself from time to time: what if I'm suffering from a delusion, and not even the people I associate with can recognize it, because we share the same issues and isolate ourselves from outside thinking? How would I know I had a problem? Who would tell me, and how would I get help, if I distrusted anyone well-educated enough to diagnose a problem and prescribe a treatment?
Related concepts (all links go to Wikipedia): In-group favoritism, Obsessive compulsive disorder, Derealisation, Mean world syndrome, Religious paranoia.
