As stated in my previous post, I believe Osama bin Laden is a religious fundamentalist cult leader with a major messiah complex. But what exactly is a "messiah complex"? Psychiatrist Carl Jung is credited with first introducing the term "complex" into the psychoanalytic lexicon. Prior to Jung's relatively brief but fruitful collaboration with him, Freud utilized an altogether different terminology to denote the now famous "Oedipus complex." Later, Alfred Adler, another of Freud's former followe
Radar Magazine Reveals Government List of As Many As Eight Million Potential Troublemakers
According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeabl
Moments... we seem to live our entire existence based on moments. Moments that standout for one reason or another... moments that stand as highlights that we use to summarize a previous year, a previous relationship or career and we discredit all of the surrounding moments that are seemingly less poignant. If you took a vacation to Mexico five years ago and the entire trip was pleasant until day five when you chose to grab a quick chimichanga from a street vendor and spent the rest of the night
 Moments… we seem to live our entire existence based on moments. Moments that standout for one reason or another… moments that stand as highlights that we use to summarize a previous year, a previous relationship or career and we discredit all of the surrounding moments that are seemingly less poignant. If you took a vacation to Mexico five years ago and the entire trip was pleasant until day five when you chose to grab a quick chimichanga from a street vendor and spent the rest of the nig
I've been undergoing a mental strangeness lately. Bear with me, like all internal weirdness, this is a minor thing to any in the outside world. Nothing extreme--like, hearing voices or believing that i was kidnapped by aliens and examined...it is just that lately i have had this creepy feeling that i am being judged by everyone around me...especially in public? I mean this feeling is fairly intense...and strangely consistent..I admit that i have suffered from this circumstance before but not to
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Paranoia Classification and external resources
ICD-9
295.3, 297.1, 297.2
For other senses of this word, see paranoia (disambiguation).
Paranoia is a disturbed thought process characterized by excessive anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs concerning a perceived threat. In the original Greek, παÏάνοια (paranoia) simply means madness (para = outside; nous = mind) and, historically, this characterization was used to describe any delusional state.
Sometimes in common usage, the term paranoia is misused to describe a phobia. For example, a person may not want to fly out of fear the plane may crash. This does not in itself indicate paranoia, but rather a phobia. The lack of blame in this case usually points to the latter.
Use in psychiatry
More recently, the clinical use of the term has been used to describe delusions where the affected person believes he is 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, sometimes schizophrenia, although attenuated features may be present in other primarily non-psychotic diagnoses, such as paranoid personality disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder. Paranoia can also be a side effect of medication or recreational drugs such as marijuana and particularly stimulants such as methamphetamine and crack cocaine.
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.
Therefore, in common usage, the term paranoid addresses a range of mental conditions, assumed by the use of the term to be of psychiatric origin, in which the subject is seen to generalise or project fears and anxieties onto the external world, particularly in the form of organised behaviour focused on them. The syndrome is applied equally to powerful people like executives obsessed with takeover bids or political leaders convinced of plots against them, and to common people who believe for instance that shadowy agencies are operating against them.
History
The term paranoia was used 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, 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. 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'.
See also
Delusional disorder
Distrust
Ideas of reference
Monomania
Paranoid personality disorder
Pronoia (psychology)
Schizophrenia
The Conversation - a film by Francis Ford Coppola which explores paranoia
References
^ Freeman, D. & Garety, P.A. (2004) Paranoia: The Psychology of Persecutory Delusions. Hove: Psychology Press. ISBN 1-84169-522-X
Further reading
Farrell, John. Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau (Cornell University Press, 2006).
Freeman, D. & Garety, P.A. (2004) Paranoia: The Psychology of Persecutory Delusions. Hove: Psychology Press. ISBN 1-84169-522-X
Igmade (Stephan Trüby et al, eds.), 5 Codes: Architecture, Paranoia and Risk in Times of Terror", Birkhäuser 2006. ISBN 3-7643-7598-1
Kantor, Martin. (2004) Understanding Paranoia: A Guide for Professionals, Families, and Sufferers. Westport: Praeger Press. ISBN 0-275-98152-5
Munro, A. (1999) Delusional disorder. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-58180-X
Sims, A. (2002) Symptoms in the mind: An introduction to descriptive psychopathology (3rd edition). Edinburgh: Elsevier Science Ltd. ISBN 0-7020-2627-1
Siegel, Ronald K. (1994) Whispers: The Voices of Paranoia. New York: Crown.
