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'Paranoia' is a disturbed thought process characterized by excessive anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs concerning a perceived threat. In the original Greek, παράνοια (''paranoia'') simply means madness (para = outside; nous = mind) and, historically, this characterization was used to describe any delusional state.
Paranoia is distinct from phobia, which is more descriptive of an irrational and persistent fear, usually unfounded, of certain situations, objects, animals, activities, or social settings. By contrast, a person suffering paranoia or paranoid delusions tends more to blame or fear others for supposedly ''intentional'' actions that somehow affect the afflicted individual.

Contents

Use in psychiatry

Causes of Paranoia

History

See also

Further reading

Use in psychiatry

More recently, the clinical use of the term has been used to describe delusions where the affected person believes they are being persecuted. Specifically, they have been defined as containing two central elements:
# The individual thinks that harm is occurring, or is going to occur, to him or her.
# The individual thinks that the persecutor has the intention to cause harm.
Paranoia is often associated with psychotic illnesses, particularly schizophrenia, although attenuated features may be present in other primarily non-psychotic diagnoses, such as paranoid personality disorder. Paranoia can also be a side effect of medication or recreational drugs, particularly marijuana and stimulants such as methamphetamine.
In the unrestricted use of the term, common paranoid delusions can include the belief that the person is being followed, poisoned or loved at a distance (often by a media figure or important person, a delusion known as erotomania or de Clerambault syndrome).
Other common paranoid delusions include the belief that the person has an imaginary disease or parasitic infection (delusional parasitosis); that the person is on a special quest or has been chosen by God; that the person has had thoughts inserted or removed from conscious thought; or that the person's actions are being controlled by an external force.
Therefore, in common usage, the term paranoid addresses a range of
mental conditions, assumed by the use of the term to be of psychiatric origin, in which the subject is seen to generalise or projects fears and anxieties onto the external world, particularly in the form of organised behaviour focused on them. The syndrome is applied equally to powerful people like executives obsessed with takeover bids or political leaders convinced of plots against them, and to insignificant people who believe for instance that shadowy agencies are operating against them.
''Burn syndrome'' is the name given to a powerful psychological phenomenon that affects a person attempting to conduct a covert activity, such as a spy or a smuggler. Burn syndrome can be defined as the irrational fear that a person observing you knows exactly what you are up to. This fear often causes people to make unnatural and frequently unconscious movements, making them appear more rather than less suspicious.

Causes of Paranoia

History

The term ''paranoia'' was used by Emil Kraepelin to describe a mental illness in which a delusional belief is the sole, or most prominent feature. In his original attempt at classifying different forms of mental illness, Kraepelin used the term ''pure paranoia'' to describe a condition where a delusion was present, but without any apparent deterioration in intellectual abilities and without any of the other features of dementia praecox, the condition later renamed schizophrenia. Notably, in his definition, the belief does not have to be persecutory to be classified as paranoid, so any number of delusional beliefs can be classified as paranoia. For example, a person who has the sole delusional belief that he is an important religious figure would be classified by Kraepelin as having 'pure paranoia'.

See also

★ Conspiracy theory

★ Delusional disorder

★ Distrust

★ Monomania

★ Paranoid personality disorder

★ Schizophrenia

★ Ideas of reference

★ The Conversation - a film by Francis Ford Coppola which explores paranoia

Further reading

★ Farrell, John. ''Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau'' (Cornell University Press, 2006).

★ Freeman, D. & Garety, P.A. (2004) ''Paranoia: The Psychology of Persecutory Delusions''. Hove: Psychology Press. ISBN 1-84169-522-X

★ Harper, David J. (1999) Deconstructing Paranoia:An Analysis of the Discourses Associated with the Concept of Paranoid Delusion.

★ Igmade (Stephan Trüby et al, eds.), 5 Codes: Architecture, Paranoia and Risk in Times of Terror", Birkhäuser 2006. ISBN 3-7643-7598-1

★ Kantor, Martin. (2004) ''Understanding Paranoia: A Guide for Professionals, Families, and Sufferers''. Westport: Praeger Press. ISBN 0-275-98152-5

★ Munro, A. (1999) ''Delusional disorder''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-58180-X

★ Sims, A. (2002) ''Symptoms in the mind: An introduction to descriptive psychopathology (3rd edition)''. Edinburgh: Elsevier Science Ltd. ISBN 0-7020-2627-1

★ Siegel, Ronald K. (1994) ''Whispers: The Voices of Paranoia.'' New York: Crown.

★ Deconstructing Paranoia: An Analysis of the Discourses Associated with the Concept of Paranoid Delusion