Paranoia

In popular culture, the term paranoia is usually used to describe excessive concern about one's own well-being, sometimes suggesting a person holds persecutory beliefs concerning a threat to themselves or their property and is often linked to a belief in conspiracy theories.1 Paranoia can also be looked at by mental health specialists to describe suspiciousness (or mistrust) that is either highly exaggerated or not warranted at all. The word is often used in everyday conversation, often in anger, often incorrectly. Simple suspiciousness is not paranoia. Not if it is based on past experience or expectations learned from the experience of others. Paranoia can be mild and the affected person may function fairly well in society, or it can be so severe that the individual is incapacitated. Because many psychiatric disorders are accompanied by some paranoid features, diagnosis is sometimes difficult. Paranoia can be classified into three main categories- paranoid personality disorder, delusional (paranoid) disorder, and paranoid schizophrenia.2

In the workplace paranoia can be present in any three of the main categories. Paranoid personality disorder would be present if you had an employee who felt that his supervisor or manager "was out to get him". This employee would always feel that when his co-workers were laughing about something, he thought they were laughing at him behind his back. When employees feel this way, they waste a lot of time dulling on these situations. Therefore their work suffers and eventually so will his performance ratings. Some people regularly become suspicious without cause, so much that their paranoid thoughts disrupt their work and family life.

The next type of paranoia in the workplace is delusional paranoid disorder. The most common delusion in delusional disorder is that of persecution. While persons with paranoid personality might suspect their colleagues of joking at their expense, persons with delusional disorder may suspect others of participating in elaborate master plots to persecute them. They believe that they are being poisoned, drugged, spied upon, or are the targets of conspiracies to ruin their reputations or even to kill them.4 They sometimes engage in litigation in an attempt to redress imagined injustices.

Paranoid thinking and behavior are hallmarks of the form of schizophrenia called "paranoid schizophrenia." Individuals with paranoid schizophrenia commonly