Shadow People Captured on Camera: Stimulant Psychosis Screenshots

My first indication that something was wrong was that Nate was awake at 6:30 in the morning; we never message this early, which told me that he had likely been up all night. Nate's a CASAC (drug counselor) who relapsed a few weeks ago. He's a handsome, affable, intelligent guy, but after a couple of nights of too much meth / coke and no sleep, everyone goes crazy. My first tactic was to try to remind him that this had happened once before, and that we'd laughed it off together a couple of days later. No dice.

The picture in question, which he enlarged, circled parts of, etc., in subsequent messages. Unless you're tweaking as hard as Nate was, you can see that there is nothing unusual about it (considering the low light conditions and the many reflective surfaces present in the car, which impart a smudgy quality). In Nate's mind, however, he was convinced that there was a spectral face floating in the upper-left quadrant.

He becomes more insistent and more frustrated that I cannot see the face. You have to be careful if this kind of situation is unfolding in person because stimulant intoxication agitates people; I've even heard of tweakers accusing loved ones of conspiring with the Shadow People. Stimulant addicts are much more likely to get violent than people addicted to other substances, which is part of the logic behind my "Thou shalt not abide a tweaker" principle.

My next tactic is to lie and say that my older brother can't see anything unusual in the photo, either. Predictably, this appeal to an outside authority falls flat as well. I'm trying to gently remind him that he's high without making him defensive.

I'm getting irritated now, too. I omitted several screenshots of essentially the same conversation repeating itself. Notice Nate's condescending language ("Bro your [sic] really smart..."). If you've ever lived with a cokehead or tweaker (methhead), you know that, particularly with meth, this kind of obsessive hallucination can persist for hours. There are only three strategies left at this point: Redirect, which I had already tried (by mentioning Father's Day and steering the conversation in softer directions); challenge / end ("I don't see anything, and I don't want to talk about this anymore"); or capitulate ("I can see it now"). I chose Option #3 because I was fed up, frankly. I thought about saying "Look, the face is smiling!" but I'm not that much of a d*ck. Because tweakers sometimes get violent in fighting the Shadow People when they receive confirmation that what they're seeing isn't a hallucination, I wouldn't recommend this route. As a mitigation strategy, I challenged Nate about the importance of the face: "So what? Why's it matter?" He didn't even have an answer, and it calmed him down quite a bit just to put the question to him. I had a feeling based on his underlying personality that this is how he would respond to me agreeing with him, which is why I chose to lie and say that I saw the face when I ordinarily wouldn't. What's really interesting is that people tend to have patterns in these hallucinations that manifest across multiple episodes of amphetamine / cocaine psychosis. With Nate, it always involves photos of one of his exes, with whom there's some ongoing relationship drama / a custody situation / hurt feelings. A Walmart psychological reading of this situation would be that the faces he's seeing are the "demons" that possessed his ex to break up with him and "ghost" him - a rationalization of what he sees as irrational behavior. Stimulant-induced psychosis usually goes away with food, sleep, and antipsychotics. In some cases, however, it can be permanent.