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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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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