i have often considered making a post like this, but with examples. The main difficulty would lie in knowing where to draw the lines. Do you include any sort of agitated response to any sort of idea that isn't of immediate practical relevance to daily life?
Some examples just as I think of them:
Pascal freaked out about the emptiness of infinite space.
Everett's daughter felt free to kill herself because she was happy in a parallel universe.
Legions of young materialist nihilists in recent centuries have felt like they are dead inside or otherwise detached from life or "unable to live" (etc., with many variations), and attribute this to epiphenomenalism, determinism, or some other belief about the nature of mind, matter, and cause-and-effect.
There are numerous extreme responsibilities that a person may take on in life - ending death for all humanity, really ending starvation/poverty/war in the world, doing the best possible thing at all times, countering "existential risk" - which may lead to a harrowing existence because society and culture do not support this effort or understand it.
Even just possessing a simple insight, or apparent insight, into the nature of reality, regarding which everyone around you is oblivious, can lead to the sort of isolating obsessive internal monologue that your post seems to hint at. And this could really be anything - atheism in a religious society, a paranoid supposition about some routine aspect of human experience that you have not yet personally experienced (thus that one is more frequent in the young), some mindbreaking philosophical concept like solipsism.
The main difficulty would lie in knowing where to draw the lines. Do you include any sort of agitated response to any sort of idea that isn't of immediate practical relevance to daily life?
I would draw the line at regular obsessions, mostly because cognitive behavioural therapy at least offer some options. I have some experience with obsessions, and those were self contained, situationally. Not a personal example, but a pre-occupation with staying away from sharp objects for fear of committing suicide, despite not having depression or violent impulses,...
As some of us might be aware, there exist ideas that harm their carriers simply by lingering in awareness. One may wonder if these ideas are just manifestations of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or other neurosis, but the difference here is the metaphysical nature of such ideas.
A person with OCD may have their thought stream painfully interrupted by whatever's been fixated upon and literally be unable to stop. I conjecture that a person who has a form of metaphysical obsession will have their thought stream *infected*, such that anything they value or care about will be permanently devalued somehow, rather than being merely pushed away, or that the subject of obsession will be *compatible* or *miscible* with ones ordinary life and that one will make logical inferences about one's life based on those metaphysical ideas. The difference between this and regular personal development is that these inferences don't make one come up with useful ideas or insights for improvement; rather than supplementing one's life, they *deconstruct* and *disassemble*, by virtue of their global scope. I'll elaborate more on this in the last paragraph.
I further conjecture that anybody with these dangerous ideas would avoid telling anyone else out of remarkable conscience, under the belief that these ideas are unresolvable and would simply harm others. Alternatively, they may see these ideas as a revelation and try telling others, only to not be taken seriously. In defense of this article from those in the former category, I'll present no such ideas, because I'm not a complete dumbass. What I'm presenting is an opportunity.
Anyone who has these ideas shouldn't post them here; this article is just to gauge interest in/need for a group which shares their ideas knowing that:
A) Different perspectives help
B) Those with whom you're sharing aren't going to feel significantly worse for the burden
C) If a solution isn't found, *other* people are going to come up with them, so we might as well get it over with and post the solutions.
One may wonder how dangerous ideas could possibly exist, or think that these are just misunderstood epiphanies. To them I ask to read about George Price, the population geneticist, journalist and chemist, whose work on the origins of altruism drove him first to give away all his possessions, then to let the homeless sleep in his house. These are all *really* generous things, but I feel that the mindset of Price when doing these things was tainted by *desperation*, that he wanted to avoid a terrifying conclusion, namely that selflessness itself was rooted in selfishness, making its goodness non-intrinsic. The paradox seems easy to resolve on the outside, when one isn't panicking about it, and while working through a similar crisis I kind of wished I could go back and time and explain to him why interpretations like that are only *half* the story. He cut his own throat with a pair of scissors at the age of 52.
[Edited out some poorly received theatrics, which admittedly bordered on the unnecessary]