When paranoia takes control

I wrote this article because of a recent occurrence that has changed my perception of people. I always thought people had good parts, and depending on your behavior towards them, their behavior towards you would be influenced. So I've always tried to take out in public my best, most sincere and most polite behavior and the effect was not what I expected.

The phrase that best describes what I mean is "Just because you won't eat a lion, doesn't mean that it won't eat you." I’ve read somewhere that people behave inappropriately because we (everyone) tend to compare our situation to that of other people in our peer group and no matter how well we are doing, if other people are doing better, we feel discomfort. And this discomfort is turned into envy and jealousy, and everyone acts on these two emotions.

Ok… I can understand that people feel envy and jealousy and they gossip about you. Sometimes I feel like this too, but I try to control my mouth.

But how about this situation? Your boss suffers from paranoia! My boss was supposed to teach me what he does on his job, so I would have taken over his attributions when he reached retirement. I was accused of things I did not say or did that I could not explain. And guess what? none professional! The result is that I will be promoted, but I will not learn from him, and my learning time has considerably shortened.

After this incident and a joke made by a colleague, I began to document about Paranoia and it fits perfectly. Paranoia is an instinct or thought process believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety or fear, often to the point of delusion and irrationality without hallucinations or personality changes. Paranoid thinking is usually characterized by mistrust or suspicion over others. Paranoia is the name given to an exaggerated ego state or false interpretations about a situation, being a psychiatric illness within the psychosocial class.

The state of paranoia occurs when the subject can be considered normal, but is driven by a disorder at the limit of psychiatry. An important aspect of paranoid thinking is the centrality: the fact that the subject is seeing himself as a central personality in a scenario that can be dangerous or grandiose and interprets events that have nothing to do with them as being directed to them.

There are 5 subtypes of paranoid. The person concerned may suffer from a single syndrome of the following:

• Fanatical paranoid, including narcissistic manifestations;

• Malignant paranoid, including sadistic manifestations;

• Cruel paranoid, including negative manifestations;

• Island paranoid, including evasive manifestations (this definitely describes my boss; I don’t think that he has friends or someone that he can rely on);

• Stubborn paranoid, including compulsive manifestations.

The paranoid can suffer the mania of persecution, because they are constantly waiting for hostility, ridiculed, and treason on the part of others.

The individual has a normal mindset, and suddenly there are preconceived ideas that he would be followed, deceived, wronged. Also, normal people may have these suspicions, but the difference is that in the case of paranoids, these doubts last for at least a month until they reach the stage of obsession. In this way, individuals build their lives on the basis of obsessions, and the thinking system becomes sick.

After this experience and after what I read about persons who seem normal I can not have the same attitude towards new people anymore.