Hétköznapi gyanakvás: életünk a paranoia

Abstract

Suspicious thinking in given situations can be useful and helps the adaptation as events occurring in the world also corroborate this. Factors participating in the development of paranoia can be listed as psychodynamic (projection), salience attributional, neurobiological (dopamine), impaired perceptual (hearing loss), sociocultural (minority, pseudocommunity), self-esteem (worrying, depression, mania), and cognitive (jump-to-conclusion) mechanisms. Along the spectrum of thinking, from the mild to the severe, enhanced worrying, salience attribution, overvalued concepts, suspicion/mistrust, paranoid ideations, and crystallized delusions may occur with different contents. In recent years intensive research has been started to reveal the presence of subclinical paranoid thoughts in the general population. Applying various screening methods developed for this purpose (delusions inventories, psychometric tests, virtual reality laboratory) it has been found that suspicious/mistrustful ideations are fairly common in nonclinical samples and some of these are comparable to that seen in patient population. From the larger occurrence of milder forms to the smaller frequency of more severe delusional thoughts the whole hierarchical phenomenon can be described as a ‘paranoia pyramid’. Based on this everyday paranoid thinking style lurking in people, it may well be that ‘our life is delusional’. Orv. Hetil., 2016, 157(50), 1979–1988.