| Anonymous 2006-06-12, 7:12 pm |
| In popular culture, the term paranoia is usually used to describe excessive
concern about one's own well-being, sometimes suggesting a person holds
persecutory beliefs concerning a threat to themselves or their property and is
often linked to a belief in conspiracy theories.
The term is more typically used in a general sense to signify any delusion, or
more specifically, to signify a delusion involving the fear of persecution. The
exact use of the term has changed over time, and because of this, psychiatric
usage may vary.
Explanation
In psychiatry, 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, 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 later
renamed schizophrenia.
In the original Greek, paranoia means simply madness (para = outside;
nous = mind). Kraepelin developed a definition from this root involving
delusional beliefs. 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'.
Although the diagnosis of pure paranoia is no longer used (having been
superseded by the diagnosis of delusional disorder) the use of the term to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 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.
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 concerning his death
hypothesize that he was poisoned). The possibility exists that with enough
enemies, it is impossible to be clinically paranoid. It still might be possible
to identify a paranoid in that situation via his unrealistic assessment of the
relative threat presented by various enemies, but it is not clear that
non-paranoid persons are all that good at this. This raises interesting
philosophical questions about the criteria by which we can diagnose a belief as
paranoid or delusional, as well as prompting the joke that "Just because you're
paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you".
Paranoia depicted in popular culture
In popular culture paranoia is often represented as including:
Belief in having special powers or being on a special mission (a "delusion of
grandeur")
Conspiracy theories, such as seeing seemingly unrelated news events as parts
of a larger, typically conspiratorial plan
Black helicopters and other mass surveillance
Persecution from powerful adversaries such as UFOs, terrorists, the Men in
Black, secret societies or demons
Mind control through invisible rays, and tinfoil hats to combat them
Fear of poisoning, adulterated food (e.g., aspartame) or water (e.g.,
fluoridation) as part of a secret plot
Reading a story, watching a movie, or listening to a song and feeling that
one's life is exactly like that of the subject of said story, movie, or song.
The movie The Truman Show, which depicted a man who discovers his entire life
has been filmed as a TV show, is one of the more commonly referrenced films.
The maxim: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they aren't really
out to get you.
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