Mr. Agerton tested positive for coronavirus in late November, after returning from the Red Sea. As the expedition team followed strict precautions, he assumed he was infected while on his way home. With a low fever, mild respiratory symptoms and loss of smell, he isolated himself in a room at his home on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle, for 10 days, protecting Mrs. Agerton, 46, and her children, 5, 11 and 16 years.
Then, on December 17, a common spam call on his cell phone triggered a cascade of paranoia linked to technology, surveillance and government officials.
“I started having these auditory hallucinations,” he said. He would jump to the window at night, imagining voices outside. Fearing that families looking at his neighborhood’s Christmas lights were spying on him, he would take the family’s Australian shepherd, Duke, and go out “to check on the people in the car,” he said. Then, he would convince himself that the police scanners were transmitting his dog walking and all the other movements he did.
“I couldn’t control myself,” he said, adding “I was just thinking, ‘I’m going crazy'”.
After almost two days of sleeping without keeping it to himself, he confided to his wife, who was stunned. “Having a person who is great in a crisis going through a crisis was just total helplessness and fear for me,” she said.
He asked her to put the family’s phones in airplane mode and feared that the house was bugged. He was “very anxious” because of an ambulance siren, said Agerton, who took him in search of her. “Probably every 30 minutes, he needed to do the rounds outside and see what was out there.”
She took him shopping, thinking that “something as stupid as Costco would help make it just a normal day”, but said he feared that customers were plainclothes agents. “It was real torture for him.”
That night, she called a friend, a nurse with experience in mental health.
“You need to go to the emergency department right now,” asked the friend, adding, “lock all the weapons,” “said Agerton.