Paranoia

A certain polemicist who has focused his hatred on Muslim people certainly has a delirium of persecution, because although he manages to persuade some of his listeners which would suggest that his delirium is consistent, what pushes this polemicist to think this is surely that he is convinced that Muslim people wish him harm without valid reasons. What can be blamed on him is that he is attacking people, most of whom are innocent, and that he does not realize that these words are causing these people to suffer.

It can happen that people attack us for no reason, for example children at school sometimes abuse their friends a little for no reason. So it's not completely silly to have a delirium of persecution, this kind of worry can be a natural mechanism, however the problem in paranoid delirium, when it comes to persecution, is that we are convinced that it is very likely that people want us harm going so far as to kill us or make us imprisoned, even if there is no element to think so, or only very weak elements.

While in normal times people are going to be just a little suspicious, they're just going to be a little bit afraid that other people can overtake them in a queue to buy something, nothing too serious;

… because following the annoyance at the fact that they do not understand me, they take me for someone dangerous, then if I flee the police station because I have no choice, that an army of policemen will pursue me, that even if I try to persuade him he will not believe me because I imagine him limited to not wanting to believe the common sense, that I will be forced to go abroad as a fugitive, then I should take all my cash from a bank before leaving so that I cannot be found by withdrawals of money from an ATM afterwards, etc. So suddenly, I tried to say very kindly to the person who doubles me, that I should not be doubled :). (Tonight, in correcting this chapter, I'm rather serene to such an extent that it's almost unthinkable for me to think that someone feels that way, but yes, I felt that way!).

I was afraid that a relative, someone who had been friends with me, whom I no longer saw, and who had a character that seemed to me to be manipulative, would go and tell everyone around me, after I had become angry with him and I no longer saw him, to the girl I no longer saw but with whom I was still in love, that I was a monster, a big asshole, that they would think it was real and that they hated me and my ex whom I had left and whom I was afraid would accuse me of rape (when no sexual relationship had happened, but I felt that she wanted revenge). And so that these people hate me, and it went around in circles in my head, it made in my mind a cabal, a manhunt where this ancient acquaintance did not stop, and would not stop for nothing in the world to hurt me like this, and that even if I tried to see and persuade these people there it will not convince them. And I made scenarios or even if I hit him, even if I tortured him he would continue to make me suffer, and in these scenarios that I created out of hatred and fear that it would never stop, even if I killed him it would create a curse on me until death and even after, who would have destroyed everything that was important in me, making me tortured forever. I imagined such scenarios, to be frank I hated this loved one and wanted him to harm, but I understood that my hatred was disproportionate, crazy and that certainly the ideas I imagined were false, even if I felt them without being able to control them, and so this was one of the reasons why I should not take revenge: So I thought that if I actually hurt him, I would go after an innocent person, and that would be serious, horrible, unfair.

I was also divided by something else, I felt that he felt very bad (because I told myself that he had psychic problems, indeed, today I think he had a borderline or antisocial disorder) and I felt responsible somewhere for his suffering, I worried about the suffering of everyone and felt responsible for it. He because I felt in the end that he voluntarily made me feel even more guilty for having made him suffer by abandoning him, I found that he was a manipulator, who destroyed my innocence because by trying to help him, I received only his hatred and the guilt of not having helped him who would continue to pursue me until my death. I hated him all the more for having killed in me this innocence, those last moments when my mind was still serin.

I must specify that first these scenarios of revenge scared me extremely, I was afraid of hurting him, I would most certainly never have hurt him even if I had never had treatment, I would have just become hateful for life :(. Also I realized that my fears were foolish, indeed why feel that absolutely, necessarily he would want me bad? but yet they were these fears, and there was nothing I could do about it.

This person who was somehow a friend that I had not chosen and who had been seeing me for two years was, I still think, quite bad at least at that time (I had not chosen him because I did not like him well from the beginning, but being extremely timid, I had never dared to oppose him for fear that he would get angry), he was a problem for a lot of people around me, but I must admit the fear of persecution was totally disproportionate. My ex-girlfriend was also really quite resentful, but here too the paranoia was really too intense, I hope she would never have accused me of rape when we had no intercourse while all our hugs were consented. It must also be admitted that the situation I had experienced with her had certainly made her suffer because of the misunderstandings and the fact that I rejected her without being able to control myself, I blamed myself and still blame myself for this, I did not manage to contact her again.

Here are examples of arguments in favor of our paranoia that I have gradually accumulated:

For this acquaintance that I met for two years, the fact that he told me that he was extremely resentful was an element that made me not able to think of anything other than: "now that I have suddenly abandoned him he wants me badly because he is upset that I hate him". Or the fact that constantly during our conversations he seemed angry that I did not appreciate him enough was proof that he was sick and would like revenge, indeed his look and behavior barely hid that he was exasperated by the fact that I am not interested in him, it meant two things: he doesn't care about hurting others, because he doesn't hesitate to make me feel guilty, he's resentful and can't stand for a long time that I wasn't interested enough in him, he's dangerously crazy. Vexed that I did not recognize him, he who seemed to see me as a father, at least someone important to him, I could not find reassuring elements to tell me that he would not attack me.

Having spoken to him again the other day, he seems to me to remain someone quite susceptible, but more pleasant than before, but apparently he did not blame me more than that for having abandoned him. It left him with a question but no more.

It was, in front of him, scenarios where I imagined that he was going to humiliate me, make me look like a monster or an asshole by telling lies about me to the girl I loved but whose contact I no longer had etc etc …

the shame of being sucked when I was little:

I developed at a very young age the idea that if we are weak, ridiculous, psychically fragile, and null, that others would go to see him and take the opportunity to make us turn into a mess (at least that was my feeling). I then totally lost confidence in myself and feared that it would show that I would suck and that I would be persecuted. I had to hide from others the fact that I sucked, otherwise I would be attacked or harassed. I feared in the face of the scum I was afraid of, that my null side would be noticed (I'm sorry to use the word scum with racist connotations, but it's true that young (10 – 12 years old), because of the lying media or their face that may seem a little more aggressive, I was afraid of Arab people, fortunately this is no longer the case 🙂 ).

We can not say that the idea that "some people want to make fun of others just to laugh" is completely absurd, moreover it happens for children from time to time and sometimes for adults also that they make fun of others for no reason. But what is notable is that these ideas invaded my mind, with the impression that it was highly probable, and so it led me to fear such an act of aggression, mockery or harassment all the time. And I felt guilty if I had that kind of worry about being harassed. Every time an idea made me suffer I felt guilty for having this idea and tried to reject it, to no longer have it.

I believe that this symptom is simply due to the fact that we constantly fear acts of aggression, harassment but especially here mockery.

I would sometimes see a group of cheerful young people pass by me, and I dreaded that they would laugh at me, and so as soon as they laughed, I inevitably wondered if it was that they half openly did not care about me!

I felt with my depreciation that others saw me as a draw and I felt that they were going to make fun of me for it, I was afraid at every moment to make a blunder that would show that I sucked. I felt that it was justified to make fun of a draw, so as soon as I had an attitude, something that showed that I sucked (I don't have a specific example, but let's say for example stumble to the point of almost falling), so I tried to hide it (a bit like Pierre Richard in his films) because in a way it was justified for people to make fun of me. I should have if people really made fun of me for this, opposed them and told them that we should not take people for nullos if they stumble, but I felt that if I yelled at them if they laughed when I stumbled, that it would have been unwelcome, indeed this kind of laughter was not necessarily bad, I understood that something was wrong in my mind, but yet I kept the intuition, the reflex to think that the laughter of others if I stumbled were wickedly mocking at the moment they laughed, thinking just after that they should not be but it hurt me terribly anyway, I was susceptible to this, I understood that it would have been wrong to tell them not to be mean, because there was a good chance that in reality it was not mean laughter. I thought it was wrong to have these intuitions because they made me angry with these people, who should not laugh badly. It was the mixture of all these ideas at once when I was experiencing this.

How do I explain the presence of these paranoid ideas in my brain?

I had the impression, the intuition that a harassment would happen to me, that the global situation would worsen, that disasters would eventually happen to me, this intuition that I explain by the overactivation of the neural circuits leading to these ideas, leads to take into account in the mind first the elements that we see that are consistent with this harassment, this fear that this (imaginary) harassment will never stop… after all the fact of being of a certain mood means that we can see life in pink or life in black, that we see things differently depending on which part of our brain is over-activated or under-activated, there is no truth absolutely to which schizophrenics are completely foreign, there is no way to be completely sure that an idea is true or false, even for a schizophrenic person, it is just a discrepancy with the normal where paranoid worries come to mind so frequently with so much intensity, that we can not take the arguments that make us think that there is no reason to worry, and we believe in it strongly.

Well for schizophrenia, I think that the brain is in a state that favors the consideration of elements that make us believe that there is a risk of harassment (I think that a more or less direct disruption of neurotransmitters is the cause, without the overall arrangement of neurons being faulty), that there is a risk that the global situation will worsen until disaster, by dint of seeing that the bad sides, to accumulate only the arguments in favor of this, and to have the overall impression that it is likely that one will be harassed, these bad points on the situation, without being able to see the good sides because our mind working at a hundred per hour, can not take the time to analyze the elements in favor of the idea that there is nothing serious, in the end we are intimately convinced that it is true, even if we can be aware like me, that some points do not hold and realize that we are a hundred times more worried than others and that this is not normal.

For example when we watch the film Matrix the music (or for reports that want to highlight a hidden and harmful thing as we can see on TV) of conspiracy gives the impression, that there is something hidden, something to look for more deeply, if it can give you an idea of what we can feel.

Whether it's for my virtual world scenarios like The Matrix or for my scenarios where I imagine that police officers will pursue me non-stop. The disruption of my brain that pushed me to think about these two things is the same, I had the impression that disasters were going to happen and that it is likely that people want to make me suffer for no reason, that I would be more and more harassed and cornered.

I believe he measured it and various observations such as the fact that Alzheimer's is due to too low a concentration of this wakefulness hormone and that people with schizophrenia never have Alzheimer's are strong clues in favor of this hypothesis.

I also find that this hypothesis holds the road because for me, the madness I experienced actually looks like a violent on awakening! Everything is too real, unlike a dream where the hormone of awakening is in low concentration and we worry little about reality, if an object disappears in a dream it does not shock us for example.