Paranoia Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
- Paranoid redirects here. For the Black Sabbath album Paranoid, see Paranoid (album).
In psychiatry, the term paranoia is typically used to describe either a persecutory delusion, a self-referential delusion in general, or historically, a mental illness in which delusional beliefs are the sole, or most prominent feature. The exact usage of the term has changed over time, and due to a lack of standard definition, psychiatric usage may vary.
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2 Examples of clinical paranoia 3 Paranoia depicted in popular culture 4 See also 5 Further reading |
Overview
In his original attempt at classifying different forms of mental illness, Emil 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 that was later to be renamed schizophrenia.
In the original Greek, παράνοια (paranoia) means self-referential, and it is this meaning which was adopted by Kraepelin. Notably, in this definition the belief does not have to be persecutory to be classified as paranoid, so any number of delusional beliefs which are centred around the self can be classified as paranoia. For example, a person who has a delusional belief that they are an important religious figure (such as Jesus or the Dalai Lama) would be classified by Kraepelin as having 'pure paranoia'.
Although the diagnosis of pure paranoia is no longer used (having been superceded by the diagnosis of delusional disorder) the use of the term to signify the presence of delusions in general, rather than persecutory delusions specifically, lives on in the classification of paranoid schizophrenia, which denotes a form of schizophrenia where delusions are prominent.
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 occurr, to him or her.
- The individual thinks that the persecutor has the intention to cause harm.
Examples of clinical paranoia
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.
Many despotic rulers (for example Stalin) allegedly suffered from paranoia. This presents an interesting question because in Stalin's case, it is quite likely that many people really were out to get him (some theories state he was finally poisoned). Might it be that with enough enemies, it is impossible to be clinically paranoid? This raises interesting philosophical questions about the criteria by which we can diagnose a belief as paranoid or delusional.
This is an Article on Paranoia. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Paranoia Paranoia depicted in popular culture
In popular culture paranoia is often represented as including: See also
Further reading