Srsly years ago I worked in a copy shop and we’d occasionally get straight crazies come in and make copies of insane manifestos and maps of where gov sensors and stuff were hidden around their property.
Best was a guy, acted weird and couldn’t maintain normal eye contact, who was asking us to fax stuff to a few different numbers. They kinda looked like shitty business memos or whatever, didn’t give them a second thought until I got a call from a local radio station asking us to stop sending them wacked out stuff. I read one off these memos and it was a long screed about how satanists conjured and implanted a computer demon who was controlling him at night and even though he’s hurt women he’s innocent and all sorts of other wacked out gibberish. Dude was like 6’5” and 300 lbs so we just kept taking his $2/fax until he left a bit later.
When I was around 10 or so, my cousin who was roughly 20 at the time suddenly came over to our house at like 11 PM. He lived in another city. I just thought it was cool, nice to have a guest so late. He put in this anime VHS, and just one scene I remember was some mech shooting up through the bottom of a ship or something, and these bullets were tearing these guys apart, blood going everywhere. That was my first exposure to anime.
Anyway, it turns out he had paranoid schizophrenia. He was there because he didn't trust his family. He thought his mom was trying to poison him, so he wouldn't eat any of their food, and would only eat prepackaged food from the store. I did note my parents' uneasiness that night, but I wasn't sure why.
After he got on some meds--which took a while to get him to agree--he became a normal, functional adult.
Bottom line: he came out of it unscathed in the end while I came out liking anime
