"Brooklyn Bridge Fog" by Henri Silberman
I once read a Celtic tale about a magical fog a traveler might wander into and come face to face with their worst fear, guilt, and regret in the form of people they had known in life.
Psychological fog can work the same way. The only way to combat it in the story was for the person to tell themselves it wasn't real, as it was always the worst reflection and distortion of the truth to trap the traveler in the fog forever.
Having done that, I imagine a bit of a 'pop' as the fog rolls back to reveal the rest of the path. Or, a bridge to the new way of life.
I'm familiar with the concept of self-distortion. It's an almost compulsorily painful act, and must be caught early in each cycle to have any hope of disbanding it. This I've seen with my own peepers.
Taking practice to offset this, the reality is that struggle makes the fog grow stronger, and gives it power and voice, and sometimes in the real world, en masse, a real-life cause to follow with energetic, projective enthusaiasm.
Hearing the daily news read out to me, I wonder whether this planet has a transparent fog that flows, in contagion, from person to person.
Vigilance about how much life energy is allowed to leak out unintentionally, unconsciously, making it more likely to walk about in fog, is my concern. As my sister said on one of those Facebook applications, "You have been bitten by a zombie. Start chomping others... for points."