Wieambilla: a story of shared psychosis

A Scene of Madness

Most of us are somewhat delusional at one time or another. A delusion is a false belief held against all evidence to the contrary. Considering the current state of the world, we could not go on otherwise.

On the spectrum of delusions, you could forgive flat earthers for their belief that the world is flat because it looks so and people held this false belief for thousands of years. In any case, it’s harmless. However, there are people who believe stuff that not only makes very little sense, it’s dangerous.  

It is one thing to say, “everyone is talking about me” when we know everyone has better things to do but believing that drones have been put up by the government to spy on us and that the Port Arthur massacre was a government scheme to steal our firearms, is on another level.

The murderers at Wieambilla had a unique mental problem. I have seen it often enough before.

If the authorities think they will detect these people with mental health checks before they buy firearms, they are sadly mistaken.

The condition Nathaniel, Gareth, and Tracey Train had was first described by the French neurologist Jules Gabriel Francois Baillarger in 1860. Because a French psychiatrist Charles Lasègue came up with the diagnosis at almost the same time there was a territorial dispute over it. Nevertheless, it came to be known as Lasègue-Falret Syndrome, a name which included Lasègue’s collaborator, and it was also called by the French folie à deux (folly of two) or in the case of our assassins, folly of three (folie à trois) or folly of the family (folie en famille). It came later to be known as Shared Paranoid Disorder and then Shared Psychosis today.

We do not need to know much about the felons, or even what they believed, to know that this is exactly what they had. It is a shared false or delusional belief held usually by two or more close family members: sisters, mother, and son, or in this case, wife and lovers. It is rare. 

One of the parties is dominant while the other is passive. The dominant person, in this case, Gareth who was insane, is called the “inducer” or “principal”.  Nathaniel and Tracey were “acceptors”. If acceptors are removed from the inducer, they recover.

The people who share the disorder are almost always from the same family or are intimately connected and often have a religious background. They become isolated from the world and the relationship that develops excludes everything and everybody else. I did once encounter a case of two male friends residing together who had a delusion of being infested with insects, but this is very rare.

The belief system that these people have is such that it is not tolerated by people outside the relationship who invariably think that the shared delusion is bizarre and continually challenge it. This forces the parties closer together and isolates them further.

The more the strange ideas are challenged, the more they are defended and concealed.

The important point is this. Such people hardly ever come to the notice of psychiatrists or have mental health treatment. They do not believe themselves to be ill. Their true mental state is so well disguised that eventually no one outside the relationship is aware of it and individuals with the condition easily pass any gun check.

The great French psychiatrist Esquirol would consider the crazed obsession Gareth had with guns a monomania. Gareth’s set of insane beliefs was so rigidly structured and preserved that they prevented him and the others from showing other symptoms of mental illness. This delusional structure keeps them together; it isolates them and protects them all at the same time.

Previously, the earlier life of Stacey and Nathaniel gave no hint as to what was to happen. In most cases, the people with folie à deux are not dangerous but when the dominant party is dangerous, the others become completely enthralled.

Remember the Manson family?

The assassins shared the weird beliefs about conspiracy common to the Sovereign Citizens who think they are entitled to live outside the laws of the land, but these beliefs crossed a boundary and became delusions.

“...these beliefs crossed a boundary and became delusions. ”

Whilst they obsessively scanned the internet for things that verified their beliefs, they were not part of a growing cabal of lunatics threatening the state. The assassins were isolated and not interested in connecting with other fellow believers, connections which invariably would have brought them to the notice of the police who monitor dangerous internet traffic.

We should be very wary of governments, who hide their failure to provide adequate policing and health resources to the bush, that label anyone who opposes vaccination or lockdowns as crazy right-wing fanatics.

People who refuse vaccination are foolish and ill-advised but not crazy and during the height of protests against lockdowns in Victoria showed themselves to be peaceful and law abiding. Furthermore, several journalists after the assassinations aired broadcasts suggesting that the people of Chinchilla and Tara districts were unhinged. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Why is no one mentioning that this is the second time this has happened? In the middle of the year 2000, Norman Watt, a senior constable, was gunned down while approaching a rural property. Even recently his hero status was confirmed in a police memorial, and I provide a link to this.

No isolated rural properties should be approached without adequate tactical intelligence beforehand. These young constables at Wieambilla were lambs to the slaughter. If the Government is really trying to convince us that many rural properties are armed fortresses built by survivalist nuts, then they should be taking precautions.

The assassins lived in a high state of alert, fuelled by paranoid delusions, convinced that sooner or later the police would come to invade their property and take Gareth’s guns. The tragic thing is that inevitably this prophecy would be realized by innocent police officers doing their job having no idea that they were strolling into a den of crazy monomaniacs.