Karin Elliott is an Irish-American architect living in Norwich. Appropriately enough, she also appears to be the architect of her own sudden downfall.

Elliott has made the national newspapers due to the hilariously mad nature of her allegations against three separate neighbours. She has also been de-registered as an architect, following a professional-conduct hearing earlier this month.

In 2021, Elliott and her French partner, François Girardin, had accused another couple in their street of being ‘Nazis’ for knocking down a wall in their garden. ‘We are not in 1930s Germany, we are not Jewish, we don’t wear yellow armbands and you won’t crush us’, Elliot told them via text message.

In a letter to residents of the street in 2024, Elliott also accused neighbours who were building a wall of being inspired by US president Donald Trump. It was obvious the neighbours’ purpose was to ‘keep out immigrants’, Elliott wrote. ‘It is very upsetting. We are Irish / American and French’, she said.

The couple appeared to see racism everywhere. Girardin told the hearing that he and Elliott had inferred racism from neighbours who cheered for England in sporting events and occasionally flew the Union Jack. When one neighbour supposedly wielded a garden chainsaw, Elliott accused him of ‘racial harassment’.

The bizarre allegations kept coming. When Elliott heard her neighbours singing ‘Tragedy’ by the Bee Gees, she believed this to be a sly dig at the death of her elderly disabled father.

At times, Elliott seems to have considered herself more of a Dr Freud than a doctor of architecture. Her most comical claim was that, from a ‘psychoanalytic perspective’, whenever her neighbour drove the ‘phallic symbol’ of his car across her driveway, this was a sexist ‘manifestation of gender violence’. When she sees this same car pass through a wide-open toll-booth tunnel, she probably considers it an act of vehicular prostitution.

The Architects Registration Board has now struck Elliott from the official register of licensed practitioners for at least two years. A panel found her guilty of using ‘inflammatory language’ to make a series of ‘misleading and potentially damaging accusations’ against perfectly innocent people, ‘with scant regard to their accuracy’. The assertion about the car, in particular, illustrated how ‘tenuously’ and ‘casually she dispensed’ these allegations. Indeed, Elliott and her partner seemed to imagine most of the actions she accused her neighbours of.

Elliott and Girardin’s conduct sounds like a classic case of folie à deux, a rare form of shared psychiatric disorder whereby a delusional belief, often of imaginary persecution at others’ hands, is transmitted from one person to another by virtue of their close, constant personal contact. In one recorded case, two middle-aged sisters became convinced their neighbours were testing secret electromagnetic weapons on them, while an elderly Australian couple thought their own neighbours were blasting them with laser beams. More plausibly, one disturbed mother and daughter alleged their neighbours were keeping them awake by playing loud records and making a baby cry at night. Plausible, until you learn the neighbours possessed neither a record player nor a baby.

It seems obvious that such absurd accusations must be false even at first glance. Yet I also find it obvious at first glance that, say, someone telling a work-colleague about a Where’s Wally tattoo on their genitals, or two women singing a song which includes the word ‘Africa’ in a shop, were not all genuine race-based or sex-based crimes. But these have all been genuinely recorded as such by gullible UK police forces as ‘non-crime hate incidents’. Is this not itself a form of collective, state-sponsored madness? We could call it folie à société, perhaps?

Wendy S Walters is an American author whose latest book explains how white paint is ‘racist’. Until recently, this sort of insanely paranoid delusion would have been dismissed as being just that. Nowadays, however, this madwoman has been nominated for a prestigious US National Book Award, rather than six months in an asylum. Instead of discouraging such pathological neuroses, society now actively encourages them. In Britain, the notion that we should believe all complainants in their perception that any given action is ‘racist’ in its nature, for instance, is enshrined in police guidance under the ‘Macpherson Principle’.

When such surely fictional microaggressions are treated as automatic gospel in our present woke folie à deux dictatorship, then, how come the Architects Registration Board actually found against Dr Elliott? Possibly because the defendant was, quite literally, a white woman called Karin. Or am I just being racially paranoid myself here, too?