Hypersemiotization and Apophenia: What Psychosis and Moral Panic Have in Common

From apophenia to apocalypse: what connects psychosis and moral panic, which can grip both individuals and entire communities, and how the search for and discovery of nonexistent signs and connections helps us reinforce the image of a designated threat, thereby reducing anxiety and the frustration it causes.

The publishing house “Gorodets” has released a book by renowned psychiatrist and researcher Iosif Zislin, Essays on Anthropological Psychiatry, where he discusses how methods from cultural anthropology can be used to describe clinical cases. In a series of articles, the author examines the features and differences between transcultural and anthropological psychiatry, psychiatric approaches to mystical and religious psychoses, and the intersections of psychiatry and philology (from viewing schizophrenia as the price for mastering language to the ontogenesis of delusional narratives).

We have selected a chapter in which the author describes the mechanisms behind the development of psychoses, mass hysteria, and mass panic, explaining what these processes have in common and how they differ. He explores why hypersemiotization—as the main mechanism behind mass panic, involving the search for and perception of nonexistent signs—helps channel individual or collective fear toward specific objects (ethnicities, nations, or any social groups), thus resolving anxiety and the frustration it causes. He also discusses how involvement in collective fear allows individuals to reduce their personal anxiety.

From Fear to Illness and Back: Hypersemiotization and Apophenia

I. What Is Apophenia?

In 1958, German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad published the widely known book Beginning Schizophrenia. Observing his patients—soldiers of the Wehrmacht—Conrad described two stages that contribute to the onset of a psychotic state. During the first stage (which Conrad calls trema), a person begins to feel heightened anxiety for no apparent reason, is plagued by panic, and the surrounding world suddenly becomes frightening and incomprehensible. This is not yet psychosis, but it is an important step toward it.

After some time in the trema stage, a significant change occurs in the person’s consciousness: their perception of the world shifts, with figures (what we usually consider signs) and background (what we perceive as given) swapping places. The person suddenly singles out familiar elements from their everyday environment—the background—and assigns them new meaning. For example, while the rustling of trees in a forest is just background noise to us, for someone at this stage, the sound of leaves rubbing together becomes a new figure—a message that they are being watched. One of Conrad’s patients, a young corporal, began to feel heightened anxiety while on military duty. After several weeks in this state, he had a revelation: the nighttime snoring (background noise for most of us) of his fellow soldiers was actually a sign, a message, a deliberate act meant to anger him.

Conrad called this stage apophenia (from the Greek “to make manifest”). This is the stage of true psychosis. Paradoxically, the realization that things have a hidden meaning actually reduces anxiety: the patient now has an explanation for their previous anxiety (“They really were watching me!”) and feels calmer for a time. The problem is that this “true” meaning does not match the generally accepted one. Normally, we don’t think people snore on purpose to upset us, so we don’t see snoring as a sign of a secret conspiracy.

As psychosis develops, according to Conrad’s clinical observations, the effect of apophenia expands to encompass the entire “field of signs” around the person. Phenomena that are usually perceived as background (the sound of rain outside, the sweeping of a janitor’s broom) stop being mere background and become signs with new meanings known only to the psychotic patient, often conveying information of great personal importance.

Next comes the phase of anastrophe (the experience of being the center of attention), and finally, the apocalypse (when psychosis fully takes over the mind).

Clinical Example

A 23-year-old woman from an ultra-religious community begins to develop a psychotic state. In the first stage, she experiences intense, vague anxiety, the source of which she cannot identify, accompanied by restlessness and insomnia. At this point, she starts noticing ordinary flies in her room (which she previously ignored). As her fear grows, she begins to believe that the flies carry special meaning. Through their movements, she interprets messages from God about her sinfulness.

II. What Is Moral Panic and Hypersemiotization?

Anxiety within a human community is natural. However, sometimes, instead of seeking the real cause of this anxiety, community members focus on a supposed threat coming from a “deviant”—a member of an ethnic or social group. This group may be real (Jews, hippies) or imaginary (for example, witches making pacts with Lucifer). The feeling of “the enemy among us” provokes panic, and in the early stages, a consensus forms about the source and seriousness of the threat. Identifying the source of danger both increases anxiety (“they are among us and could strike again tomorrow”) and, in the long run, helps to relieve it by providing a target for action (“we know who to eliminate or expel to feel safe again”), creating an illusion of control. As a result, society forms a new moral consensus about the source of danger, hence the term moral panic.

In many cases (though not always), members of a community caught up in moral panic begin to see nonexistent signs, projecting foreign meanings onto unrelated objects or events. This process is called hypersemiotization: the search for nonexistent signs and the assignment of symbolic meaning to objects or phenomena that originally had none. We propose that hypersemiotization is the common and connecting mechanism in these phenomena.

III. Hypersemiotization

The term “hypersemiotization” was first introduced in semiotic literature by V. N. Toporov in his article “On the Semiotics of Predictions in Suetonius”: “Every collective has an average norm according to which a circle of semiotized facts is selected (more or less unified for that collective). Alongside the norm, pathological deviations in the organization of the semiotic mechanism are noted, both in individuals and in the history of some collectives. On the one hand, we are talking about a hypersemiotic approach to the world, when units of expression from one area (especially a non-sign area) are included in the content plan of another area (such as attributing symbolic function to a sequence of sounds in poetry, or belief in omens for those who do not believe in them).”

Interestingly, Toporov goes on to speak almost like a clinician: “Thus, pathological deviations in the semiotization of facts—from semiotic neuroses to semiotic blindness (deafness)—are determined externally; since the external observer is not reliably isolated from carriers of another semiotic norm and is not immune to changes in their own norm, we can speak of the blurred boundaries between norm and deviation, which leads to the existence of very different norms of semiotization of facts.”

Developing Toporov’s idea, we can say that this “lack of immunity to changes in one’s own norm” is the essence of a psychotic break in its extreme form.

IV. Comparative Analysis

At first glance, moral panic and delusion (as described by Conrad) share many features in their dynamic structure. Importantly, besides hypersemiotization, both phenomena involve a kind of “forgetting” of motivation when the episode ends: “They still know they did this or that, but no longer know why.”

However, comparing moral panic and apophenia also allows us to distinguish between the two processes. In apophenia, unlike moral panic, the sender (source of the message) is often undefined or very vague. The recipient of the message in psychosis is only the “self,” which enables the development of anastrophe (the feeling of being the center of attention). In contrast, in moral panic, the source of the message (even if the message itself is dubious or false) is clearly identified, and the signal is directed at the masses, not the individual. Therefore, in moral panic, the anastrophe stage does not occur; instead, people involved in the panic often take on the role of “investigators,” eager to be the first and most vigilant in finding enemies, whether witches or “enemies of the people.” This collective involvement helps reduce individual fear.

Another distinguishing feature is what Conrad calls the “transformation of an idea into suggestion,” where the patient feels that events around them are intentional. In moral panic, these elements are generally absent.

V. Cognitive Features of Hypersemiotization

Hypersemiotization can be considered both at the semiotic and neurocognitive levels. Cognitively, it can be described using the theory of cognitive styles, particularly the parameters of field dependence/independence and tolerance/intolerance for unrealistic experience. From this perspective, individuals with a fixed field-independent style and high tolerance for unrealistic experience are most prone to hypersemiotization.

Physiologically, hypersemiotization may be linked to two well-described mechanisms in visual recognition: the magnocellular system, which operates quickly and is responsible for global perception, and the parvocellular system, which is slower and responsible for analytical perception. In this context, dominance of the parvocellular system, which is more sensitive to subtle threatening stimuli, may underlie hypersemiotization.

Conclusion

Thus, hypersemiotization becomes one of the main mechanisms, or switches, channeling individual or collective fear in a specific direction, thereby helping to resolve anxiety and the frustration it causes. The dynamics of psychotic anxiety, which usually forms and resolves over a relatively short period and is fairly easy to observe, can serve as a model for describing individual and collective fears.

Despite the similarities and differences between the two processes described above, we do not consider moral panic to be a form of mass psychosis, nor do we conflate the two concepts, even though moral panic and mass psychosis share similar elements. On the contrary, we believe that comparative analysis allows us to identify both common and distinguishing features of these phenomena.

Introducing the term “hypersemiotization” helps distinguish between mass psychosis and mass hysteria, which are often confused in the literature. The common feature of moral panic and mass hysteria is that, in the latter, participants first receive a unified understanding of new meaning from an external inducer, and only then, based on this, do they identify and interpret new signs in the same way. In the development of delusional psychosis, the process is reversed: at the onset of the mental break, during the apophenia stage, new signs are identified first, and only later does the delusional insight emerge based on them.

In our view, true mass delusional psychosis can only be said to occur when the following conditions are met:

• A high level of uncertainty and anxiety within the group
• Mass, but uniform/unidirectional hypersemiotization
• The development of delusions of identical content simultaneously in several individuals

These conditions are most often met in psychoses such as folie à deux or folie à trois and are almost impossible to achieve even in relatively small groups. That is why, in most cases described in the professional literature as “mass psychosis,” what is actually being discussed is mass hysteria, where the “contagion” mechanism via hypersemiotization works differently. For this reason, moral panic does not turn into mass psychosis, but it can trigger individual psychosis.