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Borderline personality disorder, in which you have fast emotional swings where you can worship someone one moment and hate them the next, can also cause paranoid thoughts and even clinical paranoia in some people.
Drugs like marijuana, hallucinogens (LSD, psychotropic mushrooms), and stimulants (cocaine, methamphetamine) have chemicals that make some people paranoid for short periods. Once the chemicals leave your system, the paranoia goes away, too. Days or weeks of intense alcohol abuse also can cause short-term paranoia, and over the long term, it can lead to ongoing paranoia and even hallucinations.
If paranoid thoughts are making you anxious or if you have minor symptoms of depression, drugs can make them much worse. In some people, they can trigger a psychiatric disorder with true clinical paranoia as a symptom.
Making false accusations and the general distrust of other people also frequently accompany paranoia.[2] For example, a paranoid person might believe an incident was intentional when most people would view it as an accident or coincidence. Paranoia is a central symptom of psychosis.[3]
A common symptom of paranoia is attribution bias. These individuals typically have a biased perception of reality, often exhibiting more hostile beliefs than average.[4] A paranoid person may view someone else's accidental behavior as though it is intentional or signifies a threat.
An investigation of a non-clinical paranoid population found that characteristics such as feeling powerless and depressed, isolating oneself, and relinquishing activities, were associated with more frequent paranoia.[5]Some scientists have created different subtypes for the various symptoms of paranoia, including erotic, persecutory, litigious, and exalted.[6]
Some researchers have arranged types of paranoia by commonality. The least common types of paranoia at the very top of the hierarchy would be those involving more serious threats. Social anxiety is at the bottom of this hierarchy as the most frequently exhibited level of paranoia.[8]
Social circumstances appear to be highly influential on paranoid beliefs. According to a mental health survey distributed to residents of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua (in Mexico) and El Paso, Texas (in the United States), paranoid beliefs seem to be associated with feelings of powerlessness and victimization, enhanced by social situations. Paranoid symptoms were associated with an attitude of mistrust and an external locus of control. Citing research showing that women and those with lower socioeconomic status are more prone to locating locus of control externally, the researchers suggested that women may be especially affected by the effects of socioeconomic status on paranoia.[9]
Surveys have revealed that paranoia can develop from difficult parental relationships and untrustworthy environments, for instance those that were highly disciplinary, strict, and unstable, could contribute to paranoia. Some sources have also noted that indulging and pampering the child could contribute to greater paranoia, via disrupting the child's understanding of their relationship with the world.[10] Experiences found to enhance or create paranoia included frequent disappointment, stress, and a sense of hopelessness.[11]
Discrimination has also been reported as a potential predictor of paranoid delusions. Such reports that paranoia seemed to appear more in older patients who had experienced greater discrimination throughout their lives. Immigrants are more subject to some forms of psychosis than the general population, which may be related to more frequent experiences of discrimination and humiliation.[12]
It has been suggested that a "hierarchy" of paranoia exists, extending from mild social evaluative concerns, through ideas of social reference, to persecutory beliefs concerning mild, moderate, and severe threats.[15]
Drug-induced paranoia, associated with cannabis, amphetamines, methamphetamine and similar stimulants has much in common with schizophrenic paranoia; the relationship has been under investigation since 2012. Drug-induced paranoia has a better prognosis than schizophrenic paranoia once the drug has been removed.[16] For further information, see stimulant psychosis and substance-induced psychosis.
Based on data obtained by the Dutch NEMESIS project in 2005, there was an association between impaired hearing and the onset of symptoms of psychosis, which was based on a five-year follow up. Some older studies have actually declared that a state of paranoia can be produced in patients that were under a hypnotic state of deafness. This idea however generated much skepticism during its time.[17]
According to Michael Phelan, Padraig Wright, and Julian Stern (2000),[32] paranoia and paraphrenia are debated entities that were detached from dementia praecox by Kraepelin, who explained paranoia as a continuous systematized delusion arising much later in life with no presence of either hallucinations or a deteriorating course, paraphrenia as an identical syndrome to paranoia but with hallucinations. Even at the present time, a delusion need not be suspicious or fearful to be classified as paranoid. A person might be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia without delusions of persecution, simply because their delusions refer mainly to themselves.
While there is no absolute cure for the conditions that cause paranoia, treatment can help the person cope with their symptoms and live a happier, more productive life. Treatment depends on the type and severity of the condition but may include:
Paranoia involves intense anxious or fearful feelings and thoughts often related to persecution, threat, or conspiracy. Paranoia can occur with many mental health conditions but is most often present in psychotic disorders. Paranoid thoughts can become delusions when irrational thoughts and beliefs become so fixed that nothing can convince a person that what they think or feel is not true. When a person has paranoia or delusions, but no other symptoms (like hearing or seeing things that aren't there), they might have what is called a delusional disorder. Because only thoughts are impacted, a person with delusional disorder can usually work and function in everyday life, however, their lives may be limited and isolated as a result of their delusions.
Symptoms of paranoia and delusional disorders include intense and irrational mistrust or suspicion, which can bring on feelings of fear, anger, and betrayal. Some beliefs and behaviors of individuals with symptoms of paranoia include mistrust, hypervigilance (constantly looking for threats), difficulty with forgiveness, defensive attitude in response to imagined criticism, preoccupation with hidden motives, fear of being tricked or taken advantage of, trouble relaxing, or being argumentative.
A delusion is an odd belief that a person firmly insists is true despite evidence that it is not. Cultural beliefs that may seem odd but are widely accepted are not considered to be delusions. Delusions may or may not involve paranoia. Two of the most common types of delusions are delusions of grandeur or persecutory delusions.
Paranoia is usually treated with a combination of medication and cognitive behavioral therapy. The most important element in treating paranoia and delusional disorders is building a trusting relationship between the person experiencing the disorder and the provider to reduce the impact of irrational fearful thoughts and improve social skills. People with paranoia or delusional disorders may have trouble with the treatment process at first since symptoms often include irritability, emotionally guardedness, and possible hostility. Oftentimes, progress on paranoid delusions and especially delusional disorders is slow. Regardless of how slow the process, recovery and reconnection are possible.
Everyone experiences paranoid thoughts at some point in their life, but paranoia is the constant experience of symptoms and unfounded feelings of paranoia. The symptoms of paranoia vary in severity and can interfere with all areas of life. Symptoms include:
People with paranoia may feel that others are plotting against them or trying to cause them physical or emotional harm, and maybe even stealing from them. They may be unable to work with others and can be hostile or detached, leading to isolation.
If your paranoia is part of a psychiatric issue, your doctor will refer you to a psychiatrist or a psychologist who will perform an evaluation and psychological tests to help them determine your mental status.
For people who seek treatment and follow through with it, the outlook for paranoia is usually positive. However, treatment may be a slow process. Therapy and medication are effective in treating it. People with paranoia are usually distrustful of others and perceive paranoid thoughts as real. This makes the process of seeking treatment difficult.
Evidence for the sort of inter-coalition competition that we propose results in selective pressure for variation in paranoia is also present for other species, raising the question of to what extent features of paranoia may be present in non-humans animals. For example, lethal intergroup competition in the form of lethal raiding occurs also in chimpanzees62, and more subtle forms of coalitional competition have also been observed in many other social non-human species (see61 for a review). There is also convincing evidence for variation in social anxiety in non-human species54. However, we would argue that the key cognitive mechanism that underlies the ability for paranoid thinking: namely the ability to reason about unobservable causal mechanisms to explain why events have occurred in the past or might occur in the future seems to be, for the most part, unique to humans113. Additionally, the most complex forms of coordination and conspiracy are likely to rely on capacities for language and communication that are not present in any non-human species. It is possible that the ability to attribute intentions to others (also key in paranoia and arguably absent in non-human species114) might represent an instantiation of this ability for inferential causal reasoning, albeit one that is specific to the social domain115. The question of what selective pressures are most likely to have favoured the human-specific propensity to seek diagnostic causal explanations for phenomena humans is hotly debated (see115,116) and a full discussion is beyond the scope of this article. Specifically, it remains an open question whether the human tendency to seek and draw causal inferences evolved in response to social selection pressures, or whether this is more likely to have evolved in response to ecological selection pressures, being subsequently co-opted and used in the social domain.
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