Run, Hide, Repeat

September 6, 2017 2:49 PM

Pauline Dakin believed her family was fleeing the Mafia. Then she uncovered the real story (Transcript available here). By the time she was 11, Dakin had attended six schools in seven years: "I knew there was something very strange about my family all the time I was growing up. My brother and I would talk about 'what do you think it is?' A couple of times we had moved away without telling anybody and turned up thousands of kilometres away and picked up the pieces again."

Twice, without any notice, her mother moved her and her brother across the country, wrenching them from their daily lives.

Then in 1983, when the former CBC journalist was 23, she met her mother and a longtime family friend, Stan Sears — a father-figure to Dakin — at the Blue Bird Motel, in Sussex, N.B.

Their secret was finally revealed: they were running from the Mafia and had been since Dakin was little.

[...]

What was really going on was possibly even more disturbing and bizarre and would change Dakin's life forever.

posted by mandolin conspiracy (18 comments total)

Can we maybe not do the click-baity thing?

What's really going on is that Sears suffers from schizophrenia and delusions and convinced this family that a series of dire threats were real.
posted by Frayed Knot at 3:10 PM on September 6, 2017 [116 favorites]

Delusional disorder is what she suspects it was, not schizophrenia.
posted by ernielundquist at 3:16 PM on September 6, 2017 [29 favorites]

Thanks, Frayed Knot and ernielundquist. I appreciate having that info before I wade into reading something that's been set up the way this post is framed. I likely wouldn't have read any of it -- too many possible personal triggers from my own family history that way lie. Now I can read on, knowing it's not about what I feared it was about.
posted by tzikeh at 3:19 PM on September 6, 2017 [8 favorites]

My bad - a TW is probably in order.

One of the things she says is this:

PAULINE DAKIN: Well I think the obvious one is that things aren't always as they appear right. I appeared to have a pretty normal life, most of the time I think. The other is I do hope people, this under recognized illness could be hijacking a lot of other lives too. I know it's so hard to find the people to do the studies but it seems to me that there needs to be somebody paying more attention to this. And also there are probably kids out there that were in a similar condition to me.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 3:24 PM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

personally I liked reading the story without being certain how it was going to turn out, but for sure YMMV.
posted by saturday_morning at 3:28 PM on September 6, 2017 [18 favorites]

From my experience with abusers making shit up, why has she ruled out the likelihood that Stan Sears was just an abuser making shit up? A cult leader who failed to launch, as it were. Because it seems a lot more important to foreground the harm that he caused, and the amount to which he chose not to care about how much he was hurting these people, than it does to care about how sincere he was in his beliefs about the lies he told in order to control and hurt people.
posted by ambrosen at 3:55 PM on September 6, 2017 [8 favorites]

I don't judge the book from the way she condenses it for interviews, but there is a lot missing from the interview's idea of what distinguishes schizophrenia from other delusional disorders. you can have bizarre delusions in delusional disorder and non-bizarre ones as a schizophrenic. at least as of DSM-5. part of the reason it's not a very good determining factor is because the people making the determination of what's bizarre are necessarily making a judgment about what's common/universal knowledge, what's plausible, and how educated or gullible you have to be in order to potentially believe or not believe the deluded person. So, to say someone's delusions are non-bizarre outside of a clinical context -- and often within it -- is sometimes to say: Of course I couldn't tell he was crazy, anybody in my situation would have been taken in.

this can be pretty clearly true sometimes. but it's an uncomfortable declaration to make because it's necessarily a judgment of self as well as other. you don't just judge the deluded, you judge yourself on how much sense he's making to you and how well you can follow his logic. that subjectivity is, I hope, the main reason bizarre/non-bizarre isn't so much in diagnostic use anymore, beyond any difficulty of sorting out cultural and religious factors. it makes immediate intuitive sense, but there's no way to get self-interest out of the judging side. Like they used to say, maybe still do, that you can have delusions of true things: the classic one is you just KNOW your spouse is cheating on you. Turns out he is! but because you had no proof, you're still delusional.

anyway, I'd read the book whether that guy was schizophrenic or not, whether she's right about it or not, and whether or not a psychiatrist who doesn't know him well can accurately figure it out. but I don't think any of those things are knowable at a remove.
posted by queenofbithynia at 4:10 PM on September 6, 2017 [9 favorites]

Wrong thread - so sorry - what I meant to write here was I really enjoyed this article and appreciated the framing.
posted by Joey Michaels at 4:13 PM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

Sounds like a folie à deux.
posted by FungusCassetteBicker at 7:10 PM on September 6, 2017 [4 favorites]

Haven't go through it yet, although tabs have been opened, but wanted to say cheers about also linking the transcript.
posted by Samizdata at 7:25 PM on September 6, 2017 [9 favorites]

Having just dealt with an otherwise good friend who is convinced that various people are trying to poison him, spraying his apartment and his clothes with chemicals no matter how many special locks he puts on, I can now relate a bit more. While his story is not nearly so elaborate, I thought it was simply a textbook case of paranoia.
posted by blue shadows at 7:26 PM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

Francis E. Dec probably suffered from something similar, with his complaints that the agents of the Communist Gangster Computer God were spraying him with deadly poison nerve gas from automobile exhausts and lawnmowers and attacking him with “remote electronically controlled around corner trajection of deadly touch tarantula spiders”.
posted by acb at 4:26 AM on September 7, 2017 [3 favorites]

Points to acb for name-checking Francis E. Dec... can't access the cbc site due to firewall @ work. I'm sure others have linked to this site before, but for those who have missed or overlooked Dec's rants here's the one site I can link to: http://www.bentoandstarchky.com/dec/rants.htm
posted by lotusstp at 6:00 AM on September 7, 2017

We moved cities six times by the time I was 10. Once with no notice, like, packed our bags and left for motels, came back for a week or two to tie up loose ends and then move properly. My dad always said people he worked with had turned on him and driven him out. At the time, I always thought there were a lot of terrible people in the world and he was unlucky to work with them. Turned out later he had untreated bipolar all those years, which I imagine was not unconnected. (That time in motels was actually while he was in-patient in a psych ward, which I didn't know at the time.)

Fortunately he had a skill set very in demand in his profession and was able to arrange to be moved to a new city in the same approximate job very easily. Otherwise I guess things would have got pretty precarious.
posted by lollusc at 6:04 AM on September 7, 2017 [3 favorites]

there is a lot missing from the interview's idea of what distinguishes schizophrenia from other delusional disorders. you can have bizarre delusions in delusional disorder and non-bizarre ones as a schizophrenic. at least as of DSM-5.

Yeah, this is a bad write-up on that. And the implication that people with Schizophrenia are never intelligent or educated is also false. She also says that he was thinking he was getting Morse Code messages through an electronic transmitter about ships coming in, which seems fairly indicative of auditory hallucinations. In any event, the line between "Specific Delusion" and "Schizophrenia" is not really quite as bright as this article, at least, seems to be trying to make it. I'd also argue that someone who spent this much time and energy moving and fleeing due to the delusions is pretty disabled by the disorder. I'm sorry that he and other people got tangled up in his delusions, but the tabloid-esque presentation of this man's illness seems mean.
posted by lazuli at 6:23 AM on September 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

I have a family member with similar delusions, the last diagnoses I know of was Schizophrenia. In his case, a malevolent supernatural entity was pursuing him and he needed to keep distance from loved ones in order to avoid collateral damage. He left his wife and small children after his initial big break with reality, I think when he was delusional he wanted to keep them safe from the entity and when he was connected to reality he wanted to keep them from joining in with the delusion. Knowing the individuals involved as I do, he could probably have lead them down a more cultist route very easily.

When lucid, he is intelligent, kind, and generous; a very sweet man though with a sharp sense of humor. When delusional, he is intelligent, kind, and generous, a very sweet man with sharp sense of humor who is on the run from a monster and trying to protect himself and everyone he cares about using magic he barely understands.

He's doing well now, living in a group home with supervision, and does spend time with his children and grandchildren but is still terrified at being a major part of their lives.
posted by buildmyworld at 8:56 AM on September 7, 2017 [3 favorites]

I met someone with this disorder, who plainly had a dystopic lifestyle, between homeless and couch surfing, who didn't keep an address because the drug cartels were after her, in Provo, Utah. You know, Provo, home of BYU and, not so much a city as a termite mound of cheerful strivers. I kept trying to figure out what her thing was, this description is helpful.
posted by Oyéah at 10:12 AM on September 7, 2017

I've been binge watching The Americans lately, and I was half expecting this story to go that way, with the reporter finally revealing that her parents were actually deeply embedded Russian spies. Honestly, take away the weird world references and you basically have all the family plot points from seasons 1-3.

My mother had BPD and did some fictional world-building as well, particularly around extended family members - and it really sucks to have the wool ripped from your eyes and realize so many things from your childhood were lies. My experience was nowhere near this reporter's, so my heart really goes out to her and I hope she has a great therapist as she works through the trust issues that come with something like this.
posted by widdershins at 8:37 AM on September 12, 2017