Paranoia: The Irresistible Urge to Suspect

‘Homo, homini lupus’… ‘Man is not a man, but a wolf, to a stranger. —Platus

The Latin phrase from the play Asinaria by Platus, "homo homini lupus," conveys the idea that humans can be aggressive, hostile, and destructive towards one another. It reflects the darker aspects of human nature, suggesting that humans have the potential to harm and exploit each other. It should serve as a reminder of the complexities and sometimes harsh realities of human behaviour and relationships.

If we take a look at paranoia, we can see it involves a heightened sense of suspicion and fear towards others, driven by a belief that others pose a threat or harbour malicious intent.

Building a Prison With Unproductive Attempted Solutions

"Attempted solutions" refer to the strategies or actions individuals employ to address a problem or a challenge they are facing. These attempted solutions are the individual's initial attempts to resolve or cope with the problem based on their existing beliefs, behaviours, and resources.

Often, individuals get stuck in ineffective or unproductive attempted solutions, leading to the perpetuation or exacerbation of the problem. These attempted solutions may include repetitive patterns of thinking, behaving, or relating to others, but they can build a trap if failed solutions are applied and reapplied too rigidly. This can be seen with paranoia.

The Suspicion That Becomes a Certainty

The impact of paranoia can vary greatly among individuals, and its precise relationship to survival mechanisms and other factors has been well explored by researchers in the field of psychology and neuroscience. With paranoia, initially, the person will attempt to control their external reality to defend themselves from an attack that often feels constant towards them. Sometimes a paranoid person tries to control everything and everyone.

This attempt at control makes others perceive them as being distrustful and feel discomfort in their presence. This, in turn, creates distrust in the paranoid person, slowly feeding their beliefs and pattern of interaction.

The attempt at control turns into a concrete trigger for that vicious circle that feeds the disorder. The vicious circle takes on the form: "I have a suspicion about others and I will try to control them, but this makes others suspect me." Eventually, the suspicious person observes only a confirmation that their doubts were correct in the first place, leading them to behave even more suspiciously towards others.

Persecution

A further aggravation occurs when paranoia becomes attached to a sense of persecution. This is the belief that one is being spied on, persecuted, the subject of conspiracies, or possibly poisoned. Patients who suffer from a sense of persecution more often than not fear being victims of some action aimed directly at damaging them.

Persecution differs from pure paranoia because a belief exists that others have an evil intent, that they plot and plot deliberately against the person themselves — even leading to the unfounded and irrational fear that someone is following them or that they may be discovered at any moment.

Creating Something From Nothing

In a typical situation, the paranoid person continually searches for confirmation concerning their suspicions, which involves them doubting everything and everyone and leads the paranoid person to live constantly in doubt.

We have observed in the clinic that those who suffer from paranoia can in some cases actively involve family members in their suspicious beliefs, directly or indirectly. If family members adhere to the patient's belief, then it becomes reinforced. If, however, family and friends show hesitation, they may receive outbursts of anger from the patient, keeping everyone imprisoned by the disorder.

Everyone joins in searching for the solution but ends up joining the problem. On the one hand, family and friends try to reason with the patient, to rationally explain the strangeness of their behaviours, and on the other hand, the patient begins to think suspiciously:“If you don't understand me, then in my mind it means that you are against me.”

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To escape this situation, the person will begin to interpret, often very rigidly, all information that surrounds them in a negative way. In every situation, they become focused on scrupulously searching for all those elements that can confirm their paranoid beliefs. They see interactions in the following way: “If you request something of me, or do something for me, it is not because you have my best intentions at heart but because you want to spite me’.’

Our Strategic Intervention

Therapy in such cases aims at fracturing and then dismantling the person's dysfunctional belief that is driving their relationship with the world at large. Strategically speaking, we must study the structure of their problem, which will determine the type of solution and communication we will need to use.

Studying the structure of their problem involves looking at how the problem was formed, how it persists, and how it is maintained. The structure of the solution, on the other hand, is adapted through the course of therapy, depending on what works as we begin to see the person and their family. By adopting this scientific approach, we will know by the end of the therapy (if treatment is successful) if we have understood the disorder properly, which will also add to our knowledge of these problems. If, on the other hand, little has been resolved, then we should return to the "drawing board" and question our methods. This model is known well in science as a process of "knowing through changing."

Dosage Effect

Remember that the difference between health and pathology is a difference in "quantity." Similar psychological mechanisms used in different "doses" create different realities. Suspicion and scepticism are things that happen to each of us and are often useful in everyday life, but if taken to excess, they can leave us continuously on the lookout and hypervigilant. There is a fine line when something that borders on the "pathological" is a consequence of doing too much of what is "normal." While some level of caution and vigilance is important for self-preservation, an extreme or persistent state of paranoia can be detrimental to overall well-being.

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