We're more understanding about mental illness than we used to be. Once it was shameful. Treatments like electric shock therapy were common. Cranial lobotomies were performed up until 1967. History also gives us many examples of mass hallucinations. "Dancing plagues," with people dancing themselves to death, afflicted large numbers in the Middle Ages especially during pandemics. Our own Salem witch trials wrongly accused over 200. Macarthyism, based on hysteria, destroyed many American lives. In 1978 the Messianic leader Jim Jones, claiming he was constructing a socialist paradise free from the oppression of the United States government, convinced 909 commune members to commit suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool Aid. Living in an alternative reality where you ignore truth and believe fantasies promoted by charismatic leaders can happen even in this day and age. Many well-meaning Americans gathered in Florence this weekend to support a leader convinced that massive unproven fraud had been committed in the Presidential election in 2020. Their claims, though proven false, continue to be entertained. We must treat them not with harshness but with tolerance and compassion.