🔗 Microchip Implants As A Firehose Of Untreated Psychosis

🔗 Installation

The most common kind of microchip implants are installed with a needle. It's the kind of needle used in piercings; much larger and completely different from the ones used for things like vaccines or IV medications. In fact the best place to get it done is often at a piercer.

The first time I had one installed, I experienced something that was entirely new to me.

As the needle went in, there was a little bit of pain but I experienced it more as burning for whatever reason. Once it was in, the piercer pulled the needle back as they depressed the plunger at the same rate, resulting in the implant capsule remaining in place.

There was a moment where I experienced a reflex I'd never had before: my body realised that something had been left behind which didn't belong, and kind of panicked. Cognitively it was a moment of "get it out of me!", and affectively it was a sickening feeling that something was wrong; this feeling gradually faded over the next 24 hours or so.

I thought: Oh. Oh. The people who are experiencing psychosis and believe they've secretly been implanted against their will? ...that is what they're feeling.

If you actually know even the basics of microchip implantation, it's really straightforward to tell whether you have one or not. You won't feel it there idly, but you can touch it through your skin and verify that it's there. The whole point of these chips is that they're accessible to a scanner. The experience of receiving ordinary medical injections is completely different.

🔗 Certainty

The hardware side of human microchip implantation is currently basically driven by one person, Amal Graafstra. If you have a question about the field, he is your guy. He is incredibly generous with his time and always keen to help people out. He personally makes most biohacking possible and eats quite a lot of risk doing so.

Unfortunately, this puts him in a difficult position: if someone is experiencing undiagnosed psychosis and believes they have been secretly implanted with a microchip, he is the person they go to.

He handled these people with kindness and patience, and repeatedly went through all the various forms of imaging to prove nothing was there. Actual microchip implants light up like a Christmas tree on an X-Ray or MRI¹, but because this was a delusional experience, they almost always insisted that they must have been implanted with some special secret technology that didn't show up. Explaining that such an implant wouldn't be able to couple with a reader didn't help either.

Even pointing to the twenty other times they went through this process and found nothing didn't impact the delusion: that they had been secretly implanted was a fact and they worked backwards from there, so they knew that they were different. He eventually gave up and said that if they have concerns about this, to go see their GP.

🔗 Lost Souls

What's really frustrating about this experience was: here is a perfect firehose of a specific condition which is being caught before the person reaches a state of acute deterioration. A LARGE number of people are reaching out with these concerns and Amal has accidentally become the focal point for them.

We have a recurring, identifiable early-warning belief pattern, and the only people seeing it at scale are random civilians.

What the hell can you do with that?!

The duration of untreated psychosis (DUP) is a really critical metric to someone's long-term trajectory, and intervening before the distorted belief structures get their claws in can be life-changing.

If you tell them to seek medical attention, they will completely ignore it. If you alert their family or local mental health services, that's kind of a betrayal and violation of their autonomy, but more to the point just reinforces the idea that there's some kind of conspiracy going on. The coercive nature of the health system's responses to psychosis make it impossible to help people.

Any kind of support group for these people will entirely orient it towards the delusion without any endpoints leading to them getting actual help, and even if it didn't, they would likely think everyone else in the group was delusional.

And Amal eats exceptional risks already, simply due to the transgressive and cutting-edge nature of what he does. So the only safe choice is to say that if they have concerns, to seek medical attention, then to disengage.

The system is actively getting in the way of helping these people. There is no gentle, coercion-free choice which they can safely access, so what they get instead is a fat lot of nothing until it's too late.

🔗 Checkin

Version: 1

Written: 2025-02-02

Written on: 7.5mg olanzapine since 2025-11-11

Mental health was: very poor - estimate 15% brain

🔗 Footnote

¹I have had an MRI with my implants, despite the traces of ferromagnetic material in them. You get documentation to give the techs, which they read and think is pretty cool, and then as you slooowly slooowly slide into the giant machine which is perfectly capable of ripping you limb-from-limb, there is a moment of terror where you think "...I really hope that stranger from the Internet knows what he's doing." Then it's fine.