This explains a lot of the interactions in The Pit.
There’s a level of paranoia that’s not quite disabling enough to qualify as a mental illness but is enough to make the person clearly nuts.
The internet is full of conspiracy theories that are easily recognised as batshit insane by anyone familiar with clinical paranoia, but the people professing them are usually more-or-less functional in society, sometimes fully functional in terms of being able to hold down a job and have a “normal” life.
That’s worst than that. A schizophrenic paranoid is perfectly capable of finding nonsentical relationships between insignificant details (a word you used here, a quirk of a TV anchor there, an article about frogs on the web) and creating a delusional theory on that basis.
This.
I’ve had an initial assessment by two psychiatrists.
Both of them asked about paranoid symptoms.
If you are crazy, people ARE out to get you, in the sense that they want to change you. People cherish their beliefs, and often consider the belief to be an integral part of their self. They defend the belief as if they are defending their own safety. Hence, paranoia.
I’ve read that the people who are most able to guess what will happen to them in the future are those with mild depression. It’s not those with no depression at all, since they ten to be a little too optimistic. It’s not those with moderate to severe depression, who are far too pessimistic. People with mild depression tend to see problems in their future with approximately the correct amount of worrying. People with what we think of as normal temperments tend to be too optimistic and this may be best in the long run for most people. Being too slightly too optimistic means that you will tend to be willing to go ahead with plans even though you should realize that they have a less than 50% chance of working out.
I think the same thing is true of paranoia. The people who are most likely to advance the world are those who are somewhat more likely to see connections than most people. Being able to see new connections in the world is, after all, what science is about. It’s arguably also what art and changing society is about too. Most people don’t see those connections and thus can’t propose anything useful to advance the world. Being too good at seeing connections is also bad. It leads to conspiiracy theories and mental illness. Again, perhaps it’s best in the long run that most people don’t see as many connections as possible, even when those connections are correct. They are what bring stability to the world.
So in both cases, most people have very little of some psychological trait that’s usually thought of as bad. They are the ones who bring stability to the world. Then there are those who have that psychological trait to a moderate degree. They are the ones who propose good theories and who see useful connections. The world doesn’t need a huge number of them, just a reasonable number that’s well below a majority. Then there are those with too much of the psychological trait. Their theories are seldom right. The changes they want aren’t usually useful. Society can tolerate a few of them, but too many would be unworkable.
I showed this thread to a doctor friend of mine in Maryland with considerable experience in dealing with the mentally ill, and he gave me permission to post his response:
I have no real evidence for this, but my belief is that to a significant degree, paranoia is a natural and understandable feature of our psychological make-up. Certainly, in moderation, it has adaptive value, fueling the sort of vigilance that can be protective, and thus it might have been an evolutionarily preserved trait. It is also understandable in that there is often some basis to it. It can be a big and hostile world, complete with petty betrayals and feeling victimized by overwhelming forces beyond our control. Both as a species, and on individual, developmental levels consistent with normative processes of maturation, a number of factors have emerged that generally keep paranoia at bay: socialization, trust and faith in others, and adaptive defenses, both intrapsychic and interpersonal. Organic pathology and/or life circumstances can erode these factors, leaving those individuals vulnerable to the emergence of paranoia.
In a similar vein, in psychotic states, whether in the context of manic episodes or exacerbations of psychotic disorders (schizophrenia and the like), grandiose delusions are not uncommon. Why don’t folks have similarly prevalent delusions of being, say, a plumber? My conjecture is that the fact of this sort of psychopathology is physiologically determined, but the content might well conform to pretty common fantasies of power and omnipotence, which would be understandable defenses against paranoia, for instance. Yet another example: why are there so many religious delusions in these illnesses? Here, my guess is that when there is an organically-determined breakdown in reality-testing, pathology might preferentially move down a psychological pathway into one of the only domains in which a departure from strict adherence to linear, cause-and-effect thinking is considered normal, namely religious faith.
The hypothesized common thread that unites all of these examples is the notion that the psychological content of often physiologically determined symptoms of psychiatric illnesses may well follow a sort of “path of least resistance” model. Even our pathologic states can be shaped by what is familiar, desired, or what meets deeper psychological needs. Again, I have no proof, but it seems to make sense.
Although this is not directly related to the issue at hand, I’ve found that in many patients with classic paranoid schizophrenia, the delusional systems have great internal consistency after one has bought into the false, paranoid premises. It can greatly foster rapport in working with these patients when one can successfully extrapolate to something which a given patient strongly believes to be true, even when it hasn’t yet been discussed. Of course, one doesn’t want to endorse the belief that this delusional content is true (validating the content of delusions is a really bad idea!), but patients often feel understood when one can successfully and empathically anticipate what they probably believe based on a sufficient understanding of the patient’s intrapsychic landscape. This sort of rapport-building has a potentially enormous effect on the strength of the therapeutic alliance, and thus the patient’s adherence to recommended treatment interventions and the entire treatment relationship. That can be huge.
Wow. Thanks.
Glad to.
It’s not a “common form” of mental illness. This should be in IMHO.
Sounds right to me.
I never felt particularly paranoid, but when I had a Type I manic breakout, after things calmed down, a passing shrink said to me “hey, everybody wants to be rich and famous.”
And thanks to Super Mario Brothers, more people do want to be rich and famous plumbers now.
My psychiatrist friends make similar points to those made by Elendil’s Heir.
'Twas my Maryland doctor friend, but thanks.
I think beacause these people deep down, realize they are irrelevant, not very important people, and by having conpsiracies, paranoia, they can trick themselves into being more important than they really are.
Conspiracies are how irrelevant people make themselves feel important.