I'm glad this finally gets mentioned and called out on reddit.

Been dealing with it since 2014 in my family (Ukrainian Jewish, living in the US).

There is no cure, and it goes way beyond politics.

Example: my (now late) father convincing me that my wife has photoshopped herself in the wedding picture to look better. The wedding picture that I took, personally, with my camera, and posted on my FB account without any editing.

Nothing I said mattered. Everything must be a conspiracy, and if it's not an obvious lie, it must be a particularly insidious and malicious one. And if he's got some weird opinion of my wife, then it's the reality much be wrong.

Follow that up by him "catching" my wife lying about looking for work and going through tech interviews. Passing some, failing some, it didn't matter — his point was that she must be lying because she's not going to get a job.

Never mind this was a team effort, since I already went through that hell and was coaching her on the interview process (one thing I know about).

She's got a job like two months after that, and my dad was about to say something snide about it, too.

So I told him, is this what a normal person would say, dad?

It gave him pause. Somehow, he stopped, and just said — congratulations, I'm happy for y'all. It was the first time he wasn't hiding behind the shield of cynicism, sarcasm, and anger in years.

I thought, finally, I'm getting him back.

He died from a sudden heart attack 3 months later.

It's one thing to see the painfully correct RAND assessment. But it's so abstract. It doesn't say that the last 6 years of my dad's life were destroyed by it. It doesn't tell the stories of my friend who went no contact with her parents after being on the verge of suicide. It doesn't tell about another friend's father telling her, from his safe place in Russian Far East to walk out of Kyiv towards the advancing Russian army as a way to be safe.

It's some hardcore stuff.