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Both schizophrenia and paranoia are serious mental illnesses. Many of the patients who have been given one of these diagnoses are a danger to the people around them. To maintain the condition of patients, they need a personal psychiatrist. An experienced specialist will be able to correctly establish the diagnosis and choose effective methods of treatment. The fact is that these two diseases have a lot in common and only a professional can distinguish between them.
Symptoms of a paranoid state
The feeling of constant persecution is what everyone knows about this mental pathology. But the disease also has other features, such as:
- Patients are obsessed with one idea, which they are sure is incredibly important for humanity. If someone criticizes this thought, the paranoid person can react extremely sharply. It will be impossible to convince him. If you try to do this, you can get hurt.
- Delusions of grandeur and narcissism. Paranoids are sure that they are important to everyone and everything, that they have an important role to play in this world.
- They think that they are constantly surrounded by enemies. Such a disorder is explained by life failures, unrealized ideas. Patients lack the ability to self-criticism, so they cannot adequately analyze themselves and their actions.
- Danger to society. Such symptoms appear already in the later stages of the development of pathology.
It is these signs that cause the patient to enter the clinic.
How to understand that it is a schizophrenic in front of you?
In this case, the clinical picture looks a little different. It included the following symptoms:
- hallucinations. A person sees and hears what is not really there. Everything looks very realistic.
- Nonsense. The patient communicates with fictitious people and tells what really could not be.
- Slurred speech. He speaks quickly, but at the same time he cannot line up his thoughts in a logical chain.
- Lots of ideas in my head. First he offers one thing, then another, and after a minute he doesn’t want anything.
- Feeling your greatness. Schizophrenics believe in their own uniqueness, and they are greatly offended if people around them do not agree with them.
Paranoia is one of the symptoms of severe schizophrenia. Naturally, it is more correct to turn to experienced specialists so that they can analyze the course of the disease and prescribe the most effective treatment. At the same time, it is worth noting that schizophrenia can still be cured, or at least tried so that it does not develop into a more severe form, which will not bring anything good in life, but only an exceptional breakdown, being under the effect of a “rapid flow of life” or «fast living every day», etc.
TOP 4 Differences Between Disorders
Summing up between the symptoms of paranoia and schizophrenia, there are several key differences between these conditions:
- Interaction with the environment. Schizophrenics are not interested in anything but themselves, and the paranoid will see everyone as a threat.
- Ideas. Paranoia implies one single great goal, while schizophrenia implies many brilliant ideas that often replace one another.
- Accuracy. Paranoids are pedants. They are punctual. Schizophrenics, on the contrary, do not keep cleanliness and order.
- Thinking. Schizophrenia is characterized by a creative type of thinking, and paranoids have a very narrow range of interests.
As you can see, these mental disorders are easy to confuse. It is difficult for an inexperienced person to completely understand that in front of him is someone not just aggressive or strange, but someone who needs the help of a psychiatrist.