Paranoia - Types, Symptoms, Causes & Treatments

A persistent feeling, paranoia, is a mental disorder that makes you extremely stressed out or vulnerable. You tend to misjudge people, especially the ones close to you and this fear makes you socially inactive. Confusing thoughts, mistrust, and weird sensations haunt you in case of severe symptoms. 

Well, if you consult a doctor, you can manage and control it so that it doesn't become too vulnerable. Please read this article to learn about paranoia, its types and the treatments.

Paranoia is a mental health condition involving a certain thinking pattern where you tend to distrust people. It includes a feeling of nervousness, irritation, discomfort and uneasiness when you constantly think that someone is noticing you or trying to cause harm to you. 

An intense distressing thought that can risk your mental health, this disorder is persistent and can be extremely unpleasant for people with bipolar disorder, paranoid personality disorder or schizophrenia.

Paranoid thoughts make it hard to trust a person and lead to a feeling of isolation, ruining a person's life. You can find it difficult to function socially or have close relationships if you have paranoid delusions.

Paranoia happens due to different mental health conditions. Here are the different types of paranoia:

1. Paranoid Personality Disorder

This trait doesn't come with severe symptoms, and doctors consider it to be one of the mildest types. As a result, you tend to function well even when you are diagnosed with this trait. However, being an inherent personality trait, the attributes of paranoid personality disorder are very much present in your life.

2. Delusional Paranoid Disorder

This trait comes with the dominance of a single false belief or delusion and doesn't consist of any other symptoms. For instance, if you have the delusion of persecution, you constantly tend to believe that people are spying on you or are trying to harm you. Naturally, this creates a sense of mistrust.

3. Paranoid Schizophrenia

It is one of the most severe types of paranoid feeling, where strange and dangerous delusions haunt your thoughts. You also hallucinate things and find it difficult to differentiate between the real and the imaginary world. Confusing thoughts, bizarre appearances and unrealistic voices haunt you. If you have this trait, immediately consult a doctor, or you will start functioning poorly after a few days.

4. Hypochondriacal Paranoia

In this type, you feel you are suffering from a disease or an illness and tend to consult the doctor frequently, although you do not have any health issues. You can notice hypochondriacal paranoia prevalent in aged people.

5. Reformatory Paranoia

A feeling of greatness is what you experience in this trait. In this case, you feel empowered and believe you can cure or reform anyone suffering. Unfortunately, this might cause over-possessive approaches.

6. Litigious Paranoia

Litigious paranoia is dangerous because if you have this trait, you not only mistrust a person thinking they are causing harm to you, but file cases against that person too. This is because you feel they have harmed or tried to kill you. Therefore, this fear pokes you to go to the police to file a case.

The symptoms of paranoia vary in severity and can interfere with all areas of life. The potential symptoms of paranoia are as follows:

1. Having Defensive Attitude

When diagnosed with this disorder, you tend to mistrust people and imagine things that have never occurred. As a result, you will become defensive and aggressive when confronted, trying to explain or argue about your attitude. If the other person doesn’t believe your sayings, you become offended.

2. Unable to Take Criticism

Believing you are always right, it becomes impossible for you to adjust, compromise, forgive or accept people's judgements and criticisms. This feeling doesn't allow you to relax your thoughts as you always feel like you are being wronged.

3. Misinterpreting Normal Behaviours

A major symptom that you have paranoid feelings is when you cannot confide in other people. Additionally, you try to read the hidden feelings into other people's normal behaviours and judge them incorrectly without any valid reason. 

4. Feeling Neglected

You also believe that there is a special role you need to play or that you are significant to people and that nobody is acknowledging, recognising or praising your functions. This creates a feeling of negligence.

5. Exaggerated Distrust

You try to assess threats around you constantly, and this unrealistic distrust makes you question your relationships. This hypervigilant attitude might lead to the breaking of the relationships leaving you broken even more.

6. Fear of Getting Deceived

Paranoia instil fear into your mind where you continue to feel deceived or that someone is cheating on you. You also feel that people around you, even your friends and family, are taking advantage of you.

7. Overthink Interactions

When you communicate or interact with a person, you feel there is a certain meaning in how they look at or behave with you, although the matter is not true. Unfortunately, this also leads to misjudging a person.

8. Ideas of Reference

You start believing that someone is transmitting special messages to you through irrelevant materials such as mail, newspapers, television, radio or the internet. With this, you start imagining things that do not exist.

Although the exact causes of paranoia are unclear, here are some of the reasons that come with this disorder:

• Age - Older adults tend to experience more delusional thoughts due to common conditions that come with ageing – less hearing, diabetes, and loss of sight or related conditions.
• Genetic - Doctors suggest that in the case of PPD or paranoid personality disorder, your genes play a primary role if this disorder is prevalent in your family history.
• Medications and Drugs - Specific medications and drugs alter the brain chemistry (neurotransmitters) as they come with certain side effects. As a result, they lead to paranoid thoughts and beliefs. A medication such as Amphetamine is one that comes with a lot of adverse effects. On the other hand, if you stop taking a medicine named Adderall (used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), it can cause delusions.
• Traumatic Life Events - Childhood abuse, traumatic and life-changing events, losing work or a relationship, health crisis, sudden death of a close one, victim of a crime – all these are primary reasons that distort the way you think. This leads to a drastic change in your behaviour as you tend to mistrust people and surroundings. 
• Extreme Stress - Paranoia is common if you experience consistent stress in your personal or professional life. For example, this might happen if someone bullies you at the workspace or you have too much work pressure.
• Brain Infections - If you are diagnosed with human immunodeficiency virus or HIV, HIV mania tends to develop. This comes with psychotic symptoms, including delusions or hallucinations common in paranoia.
• Deprivation of Sleep - If you spend a long period of time without adequate and proper sleep, you tend to get affected by confusing thoughts, which is a symptom of paranoia. 
• Drug and Alcohol Use - Extreme consumption of alcohol, drug or related substances or addiction to the same can cause psychotic symptoms.

It is very difficult to diagnose paranoia at an early stage since these appear to be very common symptoms and traits in people. However, when you notice certain symptoms and go to a doctor, here is how they diagnose the disorder:

• Your doctor will ask you if you have any medical history to rule out the chances of you having other illnesses.
• Then, they will conduct a physical examination and try to assess these symptoms.
• Doctors will prescribe certain psychological tests to check your mental health status.
• Your doctor will also ask you to go through other tests to rule out the chances of other psychiatric conditions. These include - schizophrenia, substance-induced intoxicity, etc

The treatment procedures for paranoia include undergoing therapies and consuming medicines as prescribed by the doctor. Here they are discussed in detail:

1. Medications

If the doctor diagnoses an underlying mental disorder along with paranoia, such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, they might prescribe antipsychotic medication to ease the symptoms. Other medicines your doctor can prescribe include antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs and mood stabilisers.

2. Psychotherapy

Therapies are wonderful treatment processes that help you cope with your paranoid symptoms and allow you to function properly. You also start communicating your feelings and thought processes with your therapist or loved ones. In this way, you can gain people's trust and learn how to express your emotions too. This builds your confidence in yourself as well

3. Relaxation Therapy

Since people with paranoid feelings are restless, they do not relax as confusing thoughts trigger their minds to think beyond normal. Relaxation therapy will reduce anxiety and stress and help you focus on yourself. It will also help modify your behaviour towards others as you start functioning socially.

Apart from the above, psychiatrists are also opting for digital treatment options, such as social networking, web-based therapies, etc., to treat this disorder.

Although there is no cure for such conditions causing paranoia, proper treatment can help cope with or manage the symptoms. However, certain situations tend to get complicated, and hospitalisation becomes necessary. Try to seek a doctor's help when you notice the following:

• Lack of control over your behaviour and thought processes.
• You are experiencing anxiety disorders, depression and too much stress.
• Self-injury or suicidal thoughts continue to trigger your mind to take a negative approach.
• Hamper in work and personal life due to impulsive behaviour.
• Negative effect on family, friends and relationships.

This mental health condition can be handled effectively if you get support from an empathetic person, your family or friends. Through helpful and interactive activities, psychiatrists try to reduce the feeling of being left out and indulge you in daily activities or hobbies you love. Here are the ways to prevent paranoia:

• Try to challenge the weird and irritating thoughts.
• Do not indulge in smoking, drug addiction and extreme alcohol consumption.
• Try understanding your fears before judging and analysing them.
• Do not think too deeply about the actions and reactions of people around you. 
• Try not to be suspicious about the actions of people, believe them to be normal approaches.

Well, as you constantly share your thoughts and feelings with your therapist, they are able to detect the triggers that cause these symptoms. Therefore, they are able to provide appropriate strategies that can prevent repetition and occurrence of the symptoms of paranoia. Now that you are aware of the disorder, if you notice certain symptoms in you or any family member, try reaching out or helping out that person.