Contents
Paranoid personality disorder is a disorder involving, first and foremost, a lack of trust in other people, in their intentions and intentions. A man with a paranoid personality is afraid of failure and that he will be rejected, is overly sensitive to criticism and long remembers the harm suffered (both real and imaginary). He also has a tendency to withdraw from contact to avoid disappointment and pain.
What is the paranoid personality?
Paranoid personality disorder is a lowered level of trust in the good intentions of other people, and in severe cases, a complete lack of it. A person with a paranoid personality as a rule does not trust people and smells everywhere about betrayal, conspiracy, and symptoms that indicate that he is not respected or even disregarded. His stories have a common denominator: someone has behaved inappropriately towards him, has treated him badly, has hurt him undeservedly. The world and people appear in such a person’s stories exceptionally hostile and hide a hostile face under the guise of sympathy.
What are the symptoms of a paranoid personality?
Psychiatrists have several criteria by which they can identify paranoid personality. These are:
- excessive sensitivity to criticism,
- fear of failure and rejection,
- long-term experience of unpleasantness, alleged injustice and allegedly being disregarded,
- not forgiving the wrongs suffered,
- suspiciousness,
- misinterpretation of facts (usually to their own disadvantage),
- ksobna attitude, i.e. assigning excessive importance to one’s own person and the belief that one is the navel of the world,
- creating conspiracy theories to explain the hidden meaning of events concerning both the directly disturbed person and the whole world.
What are the causes of a paranoid personality?
As with other personality disorders, the causes of paranoid personality development are complex and not fully understood.
Factors determining the development of this disorder may be inherited (genetic conditions), they may be biologically conditioned, they may also be the result of neglect and educational mistakes in childhood. A paranoid person may also feel alienated and withdrawn from the group in childhood, which causes them to believe that they are inferior, different and not deserving of acceptance. Expressions of sympathy from other people will be treated by such an individual with distrust, as a camouflaged will to attack (deferred in time), because in their opinion, sympathy simply does not deserve. However, not all people who differ in some way from the peer group develop paranoid features (and vice versa – not standing out from the peer group does not guarantee that a person will not start to perceive the world and human behavior in a paranoid way), so it should be assumed that the personality paranoia is largely determined by individual character traits.
How to deal with the case of the paranoid personality?
In the case of paranoid personality disorder, patients rarely go to the doctor themselves. Usually it is they who bring other people to a psychiatrist or psychologist, claiming that there is something wrong with them. This is often the case, for example, in the case of a partner’s suspicions of habitual infidelity, typical of a paranoid personality.
Helping patients with paranoid personality disorder relies primarily on therapy (usually cognitive behavioral therapy) aimed at enabling the patient to understand that they are misinterpreting events and facts and changing their reactions and behaviors. However, it is a difficult and usually short-lived process, because patients with paranoid personality are also distrustful of psychotherapists, psychiatrists and other doctors. Therefore, it is not easy to help them, because in their opinion it is not them who need help, and they interpret the behavior of doctors as hostile and conspiratorial. A paranoid person will track a hostile attitude towards them in any behavior, so it is extremely difficult for a therapist to get them to revise their own beliefs.
When it comes to pharmacological treatment, the doctor’s proposition of such a form of therapy is often treated by the paranoid patient as an attack and an attempt to take control of the patient, to show his superiority over him.
If a doctor succeeds in convincing a patient with paranoid personality traits to take medication, the most common drugs are anxiolytics and antidepressants, which reduce the level of psychological discomfort experienced by the patient and improve their well-being. In the case of advanced delusions, antipsychotic drugs are indicated in the treatment of paranoid personality disorder. However, it is only symptomatic treatment and is not an appropriate treatment for the underlying causes of paranoia. These can only be modified by permanently changing the patient’s attitude and the way he perceives the world and other people’s intentions.
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