I’ve heard many cases of people suffering from psychotic episodes, who experience very similar paranoid thoughts – like having the feeling of being under surveillance. Why is this a relatively common thought pattern?
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Similar chemicals released in the brain, causing feelings of paranoia. Then the brain tries to rationalize that feeling by identifying a threat,.. hence the vague ‘someone’..
“Psychotic” is a term referencing experiencing things differently than others around you. It can result in different symptoms such as paranoia, delusions, or hallucinations and combinations of those symptoms are common.
In a patient having a psychotic episode, they might experience delusions as a result of their paranoia. They might experience paranoia as a result of their delusions or hallucinations too. The brain is trying to make sense of what the patient is experiencing. Each symptom can lead to other symptoms.
Adding in here – your brain is trying to make sense of seeming inputs it’s getting from the brain misfiring, and the similarity that happens between those interpretations tends to be similar within cultures. There are “themes” that tend to pop up
I can only speak from experience. That nagging sense of “Wait a minute… What if???” Because it makes sense at those moments that *all* of reality could have been misinterpreted. I think there are two things going on. One is a need to be more of a main character when the world has pushed so many of us to the side. Solipsism especially is a severe overcorrection to that. The other is a reaction to a seriously unbalanced state of emotions and thinking. A lot of things seem possible in those moments, and actual reality seems to be the least plausible of them all.
I’ve worked in psychiatry for 42 years (uk). With Schizophrenia you generally see the basic symptoms as described by Schneider. Thought insertion & withdrawal, hallucinations, delusions, passivity ( being controlled by others) etc. The sufferers try to rationalise these symptoms and use their own experiences to do this. To some extent it can be influenced by what is happening at the time. In the 1970’s it was common for patients to complain of Russian tape recorders reading their thoughts, during the space race it was flying saucers, then computers were blamed. To complicate matters, different countries used to use different symptoms to diagnose psychosis, in the 1960’s fr instance, Russian psychiatrists labelled anti communism beliefs as delusions.
I can only speak from experience. That nagging sense of “Wait a minute… What if???” Because it makes sense at those moments that *all* of reality could have been misinterpreted. I think there are two things going on. One is a need to be more of a main character when the world has pushed so many of us to the side. Solipsism especially is a severe overcorrection to that. The other is a reaction to a seriously unbalanced state of emotions and thinking. A lot of things seem possible in those moments, and actual reality seems to be the least plausible of them all.
I can only speak from experience. That nagging sense of “Wait a minute… What if???” Because it makes sense at those moments that *all* of reality could have been misinterpreted. I think there are two things going on. One is a need to be more of a main character when the world has pushed so many of us to the side. Solipsism especially is a severe overcorrection to that. The other is a reaction to a seriously unbalanced state of emotions and thinking. A lot of things seem possible in those moments, and actual reality seems to be the least plausible of them all.
I’ve worked in psychiatry for 42 years (uk). With Schizophrenia you generally see the basic symptoms as described by Schneider. Thought insertion & withdrawal, hallucinations, delusions, passivity ( being controlled by others) etc. The sufferers try to rationalise these symptoms and use their own experiences to do this. To some extent it can be influenced by what is happening at the time. In the 1970’s it was common for patients to complain of Russian tape recorders reading their thoughts, during the space race it was flying saucers, then computers were blamed. To complicate matters, different countries used to use different symptoms to diagnose psychosis, in the 1960’s fr instance, Russian psychiatrists labelled anti communism beliefs as delusions.
I’ve worked in psychiatry for 42 years (uk). With Schizophrenia you generally see the basic symptoms as described by Schneider. Thought insertion & withdrawal, hallucinations, delusions, passivity ( being controlled by others) etc. The sufferers try to rationalise these symptoms and use their own experiences to do this. To some extent it can be influenced by what is happening at the time. In the 1970’s it was common for patients to complain of Russian tape recorders reading their thoughts, during the space race it was flying saucers, then computers were blamed. To complicate matters, different countries used to use different symptoms to diagnose psychosis, in the 1960’s fr instance, Russian psychiatrists labelled anti communism beliefs as delusions.
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