Quote:
Originally Posted by gina_re
See, this is what I am leaning towards and I'm not quite sure if this is delusional. I stopped talking to everyone for no real reason. The only reason I keep my phone on right now is because my sister is due within the next week, and I wanna be there to see my new nephew. But people have stopped texting me or talking to me and I feel like I can longer trust them because they hate me or they are trying to plot something against me. I just feel like I can not trust anyone and I would rather be alone. Especially my neighbor on the other side of my cubicle at work. I seriously think every time he gets up to go somewhere he is looking at me and what I am doing to plot something against me or tell my boss I'm just playing around while I'm here. My cubicle is also in a high traffic area and so many people walk behind me, and the copier is behind me. I think everybody is looking over my shoulder to see what I'm doing and I get paranoid. When I hear footsteps I close windows and become nervous that they're going to tell my supervisor something. The test will be tomorrow when more people will be in the office and how I will react. I'm fine with emails, but I'm scared. I set my messenger to away because I don't want anyone to message me, but that it still shows that I am online. My anxiety has been really high over the past couple days I'm thinking its because of this.  |
It's interesting. By definition, you have to be delusional in order to be paranoid:
Paranoia | Define Paranoia at Dictionary.com
That means you're automatically delusional if you're paranoid. So, the phrase "paranoid delusions" doesn't make much sense when you think about it. I think psychiatry should have better word choices.
Personally, I think "paranoid delusions" is used to refer to
severe cases of paranoia. For example, the government is out to get you because you have secret, dangerous information about President Obama that could be used by terrorists.
By contrast, "mild" paranoia may manifest itself as "everybody at work hates me and they're trying to sabotage my career". Regular anxiety would just be "I'm afraid everyone at work hates me."
In my opinion, paranoia exists on a spectrum. There's no black-and-white definition of "mild", "moderate", and "severe" paranoia, and it's not clear what is actually meant by "paranoid delusions".
Personally, I would say you're paranoid at the very least. It's definitely not anxiety because regular anxiety is usually logical. For example, "I'm afraid my best friend hates me because I accidentally tripped over her dog yesterday". That's very logical. But this is not logical: "I'm afraid my best friend hates me because I'm Michael Jackson's reincarnation and she hates Michael Jackson."