Paranoia (Collection: Mental Health )

Paranoia is a disorder of understanding the nature of the social world. Paranoid persons see and act upon relationships and meanings that don't exist. Most typically, the paranoid person comes to suspect or believe that others are out to harm or embarrass or discredit them. The paranoid person holds on to their suspicions despite the fact that there is no compelling evidence that their suspicions are founded. There are different types of paranoia that can occur. Paranoid Personality Disorder is a type of rigid personality stance that some persons develop. It manifests as a "pervasive distrust and suspiciousness of others such that their (the others) motives are interpreted as malevolent, beginning by early adulthood..." (DSM-IV). People with Paranoid PD fight back against perceive attacks that haven't occurred, may suspect partners of infidelity that hasn't occurred, bear grudges unrelentingly, and doubt the trustworthiness of their friends. A more serious form of paranoia occurs as a subtype of the disease known as Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a serious illness that compromises a person's ability to perceive reality correctly, to communicate and to function in society. In the paranoid form of schizophrenia, the patient experiences hallucinations (auditory, visual, or even tactile and smell sensations of things that are not there) and/or delusions (fixed, often fantastic, sometimes grandiose beliefs that they are in danger, are king of the world, etc.) Delusions are fixed, and the patient is most often unwilling to abandon them even when it is pointed out that there is no evidence for these beliefs. As good examples of just how fantastic these sorts of paranoid delusions and hallucinations can be, I can report on working with a patient who "was in communication with an alien spaceship captain" as we were speaking, and also a patient who covered her floor with tinfoil squares "to keep the downstairs neighbor from firing her ray gun at me". In any form, Paranoia is not pretty. See the personality disorders page and schizophrenia page for more information.

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