What if you woke up with the alarm­ing sus­pi­cion that— like the epony­mous hero of The Tru­man Show— you were the star of the most pop­u­lar real­i­ty show on earth? Or that you were dead and had gone to Hell? That you could raise the 9/11 dead or were a form of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence? These bizarre beliefs, known as delu­sions, are symp­toms of many men­tal and neu­ro­log­i­cal ill­ness­es and were for cen­turies the hall­mark of “ mad­ness.” In Sus­pi­cious Minds, Joel and Ian Gold, a psy­chi­a­trist and a philoso­pher, tell the sto­ries of these peo­ple and oth­ers suf­fer­ing from delu­sions and the­o­rize about the delu­sion­al mind. They also make the case that there is more to delu­sion than the dis­or­dered brain. In oppo­si­tion to main­stream psy­chi­a­try, the Golds argue that social life and cul­ture are cru­cial play­ers in men­tal ill­ness and make us more vul­ner­a­ble to it— in par­tic­u­lar the new cul­ture of sur­veil­lance and social media, where every­one is watch­ing and being watched may put us at par­tic­u­lar risk. Sus­pi­cious Minds presents a ground­break­ing new vision of just how dra­mat­i­cal­ly our sur­round­ings can influ­ence our brains.