She's got Pneumonia, Let's Shoot Her

Recently some weird things happened as an internet based friendship veered close to the realm of manipulation and slander. I got a little hot, but for what reason. There's not much I can do except forgive the poor soul who believes all this is real. It would be easy to try to deal harshly with this situation, but we don't shoot people with pnemonia, so why would we do so with any other illness?

Below is the basics about Paranoia as found in the "Scientific" online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia.

Paranoia is a disturbed thought process characterized by excessive anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs concerning a perceived threat. In the original Greek, παράνοια (paranoia) simply means madness (para = outside; nous = mind) and, historically, this characterization was used to describe any delusional state.

Paranoia is distinct from phobia, which is more descriptive of an irrational and persistent fear, usually unfounded, of certain situations, objects, animals, activities, or social settings. By contrast, a person suffering paranoia or paranoid delusions tends more to blame or fear others for supposedly intentional actions that somehow affect the afflicted individual.

Use in psychiatry
In psychiatry, the term paranoia was used by Emil Kraepelin to describe a mental illness in which a delusional belief is the sole, or most prominent feature. In his original attempt at classifying different forms of mental illness, Kraeplin used the term pure paranoia to describe a condition where a delusion was present, but without any apparent deterioration in intellectual abilities and without any of the other features of dementia praecox, the condition later renamed schizophrenia. Notably, in his definition, the belief does not have to be persecutory to be classified as paranoid, so any number of delusional beliefs can be classified as paranoia. For example, a person who has the sole delusional belief that he is an important religious figure would be classified by Kraepelin as having 'pure paranoia'. More recently, the clinical use of the term has been used to describe delusions where the affected person believes they are being persecuted. Specifically, they have been defined as containing two central elements:

The individual thinks that harm is occurring, or is going to occur, to him or her.
The individual thinks that the persecutor has the intention to cause harm.
Paranoia is often associated with psychotic illnesses, particularly schizophrenia, although attenuated features may be present in other primarily non-psychotic diagnoses, such as paranoid personality disorder. Paranoia can also be a side effect of medication or recreational drugs, particularly marijuana and stimulants such as methamphetamine.

In the unrestricted use of the term, common paranoid delusions can include the belief that the person is being followed, poisoned or loved at a distance (often by a media figure or important person, a delusion known as erotomania or de Clerambault syndrome).

Other common paranoid delusions include the belief that the person has an imaginary disease or parasitic infection (delusional parasitosis); that the person is on a special quest or has been chosen by God; that the person has had thoughts inserted or removed from conscious thought; or that the person's actions are being controlled by an external force.

Therefore, in common usage, the term paranoid addresses a range of mental conditions, assumed by the use of the term to be of psychiatric origin, in which the subject is seen to generalise or projects fears and anxieties onto the external world, particularly in the form of organised behaviour focused on them. The syndrome is applied equally to powerful people like executives obsessed with takeover bids or political leaders convinced of plots against them, and to insignificant people who believe for instance that shadowy agencies are operating against them.

Burn syndrome is the name given to a powerful psychological phenomenon that affects a person attempting to conduct a covert activity, such as a spy or a smuggler. Burn syndrome can be defined as the irrational fear that a person observing you knows exactly what you are up to. This fear often causes people to make unnatural and frequently unconscious movements, making them appear more rather than less suspicious.

I think the most outstanding aspect included in this short article was the concept of organized behavior focused on them. This would be a heavy burden to carry through life and I think that those of us who wish to be good decent people should do the best we can to treat them with dignity and to avoid engaging in and therefore escalating the troublesome situations caused by these fears.

War is terrible. It stresses its soldiers and its innocent bystanders. A paranoid person must, on a daily basis, engage in a fierce mental war against so many different enemies, must be on the constant lookout for new and more devious enemies and must work and study and think to stay ahead of these enemies to win the battles. This must be exhausting.

I recall one of the earliest Bible verses I had to memorize during first grade at Hagerstown Mennonite School. ..."Be kind to each other, tenderhearted and forgiving, as God through Christ forgave you."

Kindness trumps rebuttal.