Paranoia

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.

Use in psychiatry

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.

Related Topics:
Mental illness - Emil Kraepelin - Dementia praecox - Schizophrenia

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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 the sole delusional belief that he is an important religious figure would be classified by Kraepelin as having 'pure paranoia'.

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Although the diagnosis of pure paranoia is no longer used (having been superseded by the diagnosis of delusional disorder) the use of the term to signify the presence of delusions in general, rather than persecutory delusions specifically,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.

Related Topics:
Delusional disorder - Paranoid schizophrenia

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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:

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• 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.

Related Topics:
Psychotic - Paranoid personality disorder

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