i thought my paranoia was at a low or gone but recently it has been coming back. i have never been one to be paranoid about an individual person but it is more conspiracy i am scared of and recently it has come back full force.
I have spent hours thinking this over and over in my mind and i am sure that people at my school set me up and are watching me on my holiday.
i wouldn't even consider this true usually BUT i am taking my meds, i have had no hallucinations or wrong thoughts in soo long. so why would this symptom - and ONLY this symptom - pop up suddenly?

[spiritual_emergency]

<blockquote>
The other day I heard or read (I can't recall now) this terrific quote in regard to the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. The gist of the quote was that our unconsciousness is watching us all the time and that is has far more "consciousness" than we do because it's aware of that which we are unconscious of.

It got me wondering if perhaps this accounts for the sense some people get of being watched all the time. Maybe they're simply aware that their unconsiousness is watching them.

i am sure that people at my school set me up and are watching me on my holiday.

It seems to me that there's two options you could consider at this time. The first option would be to say, "My meds must not be working because here I am, still having hallucinations and delusions. I should go see my doc and have my meds changed or the dosage altered." That's one option.

The second option would be to explore the sense of paranoia that you're having so you can understand why it's there. It's important to remember that it's only paranoia if it's not justified. For example, if you think the FBI is tapping your telephone conversations and they are, that's not paranoia -- it's justifiable concern.

So, let's say that you're concerned that people at school are watching you. To determine if your concern was justified you would probably gather information, like so...

- Who is watching you -- one person or a group of people?

- What do you know of this individual or group of people? For example, are they authority figures or are they your fellow students?

- If they are authority figures, what kind of authority figures are they -- teachers, counselors, the principal, the parents of other students?

- If they are your peers, what kind of students are they -- geeks, jocks, preppies?

It might be helpful to see if you can classify the individual or the group. Next, you could ask yourself, why would that particular individual or group specifically be interested in watching you? The answers might vary according to the group they belong to. For example, a teacher can be concerned about attendance, so they might watch you to ensure that you are attending school regularly.

You also noted that you're on holiday so there's some potential information that could be found there. What role might the fact that you're on holiday have to do with why people might be watching you? Are you somewhere you're not supposed to be or doing something you're not supposed to be doing -- like taking a holiday instead of going to school?

It can also be helpful to examine what elements you might bring to the mix. For example, it's not unusual for people (including teens) to want to measure up -- to be considered cool, or hip, or whatever quality it is that their peer group identifies as being valuable. Could your feeling of being watched relate to feeling judged or assessed by your peers? If so, do you have any fears about this process such as what will happen if you don't measure up to your their expectations? If that was the case, then your fears about being watched would be easy to understand.

Naturally, I don't know if any of the above will be true for you or not. They simply offer some examples of how we might explore our feelings and what they might be telling us that we're not consciously aware of. If you think exploring your paranoia in this manner will be useful to you, you might find it helpful to discuss the matter with someone you trust -- your parents, a counselor or therapist if you have one, maybe an older sibling or good friend. As an alternative, you might find it helpful to journal about the situation. Sometimes, writing things out can help us better understand what they're all about.

[PsyChris]

You should share these thoughts with whomever prescribed your medication. They may be able to help you.

I'm glad you realize these are Paranoid thoughts. That is a step in the right direction.

I would caution the previous poster that people who do suffer from paranoid delusions actually believe them. Any shred of evidence that supports their claim, they take it as a sign of absolutely certainty.

I like to use the example of a lady lying in a psychiatric ward. She is convinced the government has wired the ceiling to monitor her every move.

One day there is a leak in the roof and maintenance removes the ceiling tiles to reveal all of the building wiring and wires holding the ceiling tiles in place.

People with out paranoia know that the building wires are not part of a government monitoring system. People with paranoia just had their delusion confirmed 10 fold.

[spiritual_emergency]

<blockquote>
Hello Psychris -- I assume your studies are coming along nicely.

I would caution the previous poster that people who do suffer from paranoid delusions actually believe them. Any shred of evidence that supports their claim, they take it as a sign of absolutely certainty.

Here's a story for you...

Imagine that you take a trip to the country of Italy. When you get there, you realize that you cannot communicate with any of the people because you don't speak the language.

Some clinicians "speak the language" of schizophrenia and psychosis very well; some because they too were initiated into the experience and others, because they have immersed themselves so thoroughly into the culture they've become climatized to it.

John Weir Perry is one clinician who was particularly gifted at reading and speaking the language. You may find him to be an informative read. Here's an introduction: [b]The Far Side of Madness

[PsyChris]

I will certainly read it. Unfortunately I can't quite agree that Schizophrenia is a natural healing process. There is too much medical evidence to place it in the organic disease category for me.

It would be a alot easier to sell me on DID being a healing process.

[pachyderm]

> I can't quite agree that Schizophrenia is a natural healing process.

Hard to see how all that confusion could be healing, isn't it? But it might be an attempt by the system to start healing, however badly done that might seem to be.

That would not preclude making more informed attempts by intelligent helpers to improve the healing process. However, those helpers should, I think, understand more about why a person might need to deny reality (for instance believing that something is watching them) rather than using that process of denial to invalidate them.

[pachyderm]

Here is an attempt to expand on the idea that schizophrenia could be a "natural healing process" -- or perhaps more accurately a mind's attempt to cope internally with something it failed to cope with in reality. That is, something happened that challenged the mind's psychological integrity, and that mind found only an internal mechanism to try to cope with the threat.

The mind, feeling that its every move is being "watched" or even "controlled," may have the need to identify the nature of that threat, being otherwise unable to understand its true nature. I am proposing that the threat may have occurred in childhood, and it is largely forgotten by the time the schizophrenia is identified. I assure you that there really are parents who try to monitor and control a child's every thought or expression of thoughts. So any attempt to release a mind from the need to find an explanation for the feeling of control will not be successful if it is only instructed to give up the explanation, or made fun of for hanging on to "incorrect" ideas.

This way of looking at things starts with the supposition that the thoughts of the sufferer actually have meaning in the life of the sufferer, and need to be investigated, rather than suppressed. I think it is worth considering this kind of supposition, although any therapy based on it may be more challenging to the therapist than the wish to just make the symptoms go away.

This attempted "explanation" of symptoms would also be consistent with the observation, which I have the impression is correct, that auditory hallucinations usually consist of the perception of hostile voices, voices critical of the sufferer, or full of hatred for him or her. These also could be reasonably seen, I think, as memories of actual events.

In this connection I think DID would also be seen as an attempt by a mind to cope with a perceived threat to its integrity which it could not cope with in reality. That is, splitting off perceptions of a threat which is so terrifying that splitting is the only mechanism found to reduce the terror.

[PsyChris]

Well we have an established pattern of extreme stress and abuse that prompts DID to develop.

Schizophrenia can emerge from traumatic experiences or things like drug use. However, it also occurs in people that live relatively calm lives.

I would be curious to know why the mind would use Schizophrenia as a healing mechanism in some that are only lightly emotional disturbed yet can almost entirely neglect those that are severely traumatized.

I could see a healing component of Schizophrenia but I would have to place it into the context of mental illness. Those with Schizophrenia tend to experience an improvement in the disease as time goes on. However the improvement is not fast enough so that the person would have any real net benefit, without treatment.

[pachyderm]

I would be curious to know why the mind would use Schizophrenia as a healing mechanism in some that are only lightly emotional disturbed yet can almost entirely neglect those that are severely traumatized.

My guess (only that) would be that "they" are not so lightly disturbed, only one doesn't know about it.

I also would guess that different traumas produce different results. And the trauma depends not only on something external that happens, but also upon the personality that experiences it.

[spiritual_emergency]

PsyChris: ... I can't quite agree that Schizophrenia is a natural healing process.

... I would be curious to know why the mind would use Schizophrenia as a healing mechanism in some that are only lightly emotional disturbed yet can almost entirely neglect those that are severely traumatized.

You may find the following discussions to be of interest, PsyChris:

- 85% Recovery Rate

- PTSD & Schizophrenia

[PsyChris]

I do find those articles of interest. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find any of Dr. Perry's studies at my college library or through our online databases. I was able to find quite a bit of studies that Dr. Seikulla has published and I submitted a request to have them requested from another library. Hopefully I can learn something new!

I have a unique opportunity to both go to college and work in a medical environment. That medical environment does tend to biased me toward it's view on some areas of treatment. The physicians actively try to convince me to go into Psychiatry instead of Clinical Psychology using the example, "sometimes people need to be medicated." I can't help but take that view in patients the present with acute psychosis. I suppose because the behavior is so different that giving them a little peace seems. Even greater is that the physicians and myself lack the tools to provide care to patients experiencing an acute psychosis. It has been suggested to play into someone's psychosis, but I'm not sure how ethical that is. Does Dr. Perry address these kind of issues in his book?

[spiritual_emergency]

<blockquote>
PsyChris: It has been suggested to play into someone's psychosis, but I'm not sure how ethical that is.
Does Dr. Perry address these kind of issues in his book?

Perry has published several books. I don't believe he would have suggested that anyone "play into" the content that arises in such states as he would emphasize the need to understand underlying intent and purpose and thus, support and facilitate the process...

</font><blockquote><div id="quote"><font class="small">Quote:</font>

Excerpt - An Interview With Dr. John Weir Perry

MICHAEL O'CALLAGHAN: What does it feel like to go through a "schizophrenic break"?

JOHN WEIR PERRY: The overall experience is described as falling into a kind of abyss of isolation. This comes about because there is such a discrepancy between the subjective inner world that one has been swept into, and the mundane everyday world outside. There seems to be a total gulf between these two. Of course, this is exactly what happens in our society: the individuals around such a person are bewildered and frightened. They have absolutely no trust in what is going on! So everything is set up negatively, and this gives rise to fear - on both sides.

MICHAEL O'CALLAGHAN: So it starts with a feeling of isolation...

JOHN WEIR PERRY: Yes. Now the symbolic expression of this is falling into a death - not only a death state, but also a death space - the "afterlife," the "realm of the ancestors," the "land of the dead," the "spirit world." The common experience here is for the person to look about and think that half the people around him are dead too. While in this condition, it's very hard for one to tell if one is really alive or not.

I've been told, by people looking back on the experience, that one thing that stands out most of all, beyond the feeling of isolation, is the perception that everything that comes up is divided into opposites: Good and Bad, God and the Devil, Us and Them, or whatever. It's confusing, it's bewildering, it causes tremendous indecision and a total arrest in motivation in which everything is cancelled by its opposite.

So both these things are very distressing: the fear that you have died and dropped away from the world of the living, and the fear of conflicting powers, conflicting values and thoughts. It's a very aggravating feeling. This experience of opposites very quickly takes on a rather paranoid form.

I think this is really what the paranoid content is based on. It takes the form of experiencing the world as caught in the grip of opposing forces, whether they be political, spiritual, cultural, ideological, or even racial. In recent years I've noticed it's "those who might destroy the planet" versus "those who are ecologically minded." The prevailing idiom of the decade seems to shape the particular form in which these opposites arise. The main thing here is a great clash of forces; and this clash is usually of rather cosmic proportions, not just a local affair at all.

Right away at the beginning, the death experience is accompanied by the feeling that you've gone back to the beginning of time. This involves a regression, a return to the state of infancy in one's personal life history. But hand in hand with this is the feeling of slipping back into the world of the primordial parents, into a Garden of Eden. For example, it's a very common experience to feel one is the child of Adam and Eve, say, at the beginning of time. This is very symbolic, obviously. It's pretty much a representation of the psyche at the start of one's individual career after birth.

So these are the outstanding features. All kinds of imagery comes tumbling across the field of awareness. It's like the mythological image in a perfect stained-glass window being smashed, and all the bits and pieces being scattered. The effect is very colourful, but it's very hard to discern how the pieces belong to each other. Any attempt to make sense of it is an exercise in abstraction from the actual experience. The important thing is to find the process running through it all.

The thing that I'm particularly interested in here is the clash of opposites. The individual usually has a feeling of intense fear, as he contemplates what seem to him to be the forces of disruption, of chaos, of the Antichrist, of the Communists - whatever the ideology happens to portray as "evil." In any case, these forces are seen as tending to destroy the world, and the "good guys" are those who would try to preserve it. This is the element I try in particular to explore, because it connects to all kinds of other general cultural and political phenomena that we could talk about! What makes this visionary state appear so very psychotic, is that an individual with a paranoid ideology or ideation tends to identify with everything that comes up from below, and one is very apt to get confused. A woman who identifies with the Virgin Mary, for example, may then believe she's about to give birth to a redeemer. Actually, there's many a pregnancy test that we do in these emergency situations, you know, because you can never be sure! And the men are very apt to feel they're specially elected to be the second coming of the Messiah; or, if they're very paranoid, a great political of military leader such as Napoleon or Hitler. The delusions of grandeur become very evident, for as soon as one's identity gets hung up on such archetypal identifications, there immediately arises the "enemy out there" who is trying to undo what the supreme power has brought about. There is a deeply-felt fear of being toppled, a feeling of immense danger. This again has many cultural connotations...

MICHAEL O'CALLAGHAN: So if the person experiences himself as God, might he then also feel the Devil is out to get him?

JOHN WEIR PERRY: Yes, that's pretty much adequate. If one is Christ, the Anti-Christ is around somewhere at work; and if one is in a supreme position of political rule, then there is sure to be a disruptive revolutionary political party on the other side of the planet which is trying to topple you! It's rather scary, when you consider that the collective unconscious projects such huge shadows upon whole nations or superpowers...

MICHAEL O'CALLAGHAN: What about the death / rebirth aspect?

JOHN WEIR PERRY: Well you see, the state of being in a realm of death in the beginning is pretty soon accompanied by the idea of either being born, or giving birth. This is really the fundamental ground of the whole experience.

So there are two or three transformative elements that run through the phenomenon in a sort of overall direction. First, the feeling of death and rebirth, which is really symbolic of the process of disorganisation and reorganisation; second, the fact that this happens both on the world level as well as on the personal level - the world is also going through a disruption and a regeneration; and finally, the initial inflated notion that one is a supreme power (a great spiritual force, a supreme being, a supreme intelligence from outer space or whatever), gradually yields to a deeper overall preoccupation with the issues of relationship. The feelings and motivations tend toward love and affection in general. The sexual element is stirred up quite a bit, but mostly it's on a symbolic level. The process of psychological individuation required to achieve this feeling of loving relationship is also what social evolution is all about.

In this regard, the concerns of the regression to infancy are no more personal than one would expect. They are mostly concerned with the interpersonal field, with the parents and siblings, and with the problems of childhood and adolescence. The great surprise, during these weeks of turmoil, is that even more of the concern is about cultural and societal issues. I was totally unprepared for this: in the Freudian setting of medical school, there was no mention of it at all. At first, when Jung told me about it in Switzerland, I found it very hard to believe. I had to see for myself if he was right. This then became one of my motives for going my alternative way with these people.

Our new understanding shows that the process of re-connection to the unconscious, which these millions of people go through in a way that's usually so very hazardous, isolated and uncreative, is nonetheless made up of the same stuff as seers, visionaries, cultural reformers and prophets go through. They also experience much of the same content, except that in their case it is specifically concerned, first and foremost, with the culture itself. Any kind of personal subjective ideation is made to serve and clarify that end.

When I started looking into these cultural parallels of the "schizophrenic" process, I also began to find very clear similarities in the rituals of almost every society. There are striking parallels in the visionary states of reformers and prophets and Messiahs. Messiahs are found all over the world, you know! Almost any culture that's going through a profound upheaval of rapid turbulent change, produces seers and visionaries who glimpse the new myth-form and express its guidelines - the basic ideas and paradigms that give the people a new sense of direction. This is particularly true, of course, at the tribal level - in almost every part of the world. The shamanic visions are particularly close to what we see in "psychosis," with all the ideation of death and rebirth, and symbols of world destruction and regeneration.

MICHAEL O'CALLAGHAN: Are you saying, then, that the psychosymbolic images, feelings and ideas which emerge into consciousness during the "schizophrenic" process, also carry basic symbolic relevance - at the level of the collective unconscious - to the alienation of Humankind as a whole?

JOHN WEIR PERRY: Yes! One thing that is quite significant in this respect is that each decade shows a marked difference in the typical content of the ideation. During the Fifties, for example, I used to see alot about "Democracy" and "Communism." For many Americans at that time, the coincidence of opposites was symbolically expressed in terms of America versus Russia, and a big showdown between the forces of liberty and oppression. A little later on that content tapered off, and the moral values and the issues of war and peace that typified the Sixties came to the fore. In the Seventies, I saw alot of concern with global concerns like preserving the planet and paying attention to nature. The "bad guys" in this case were cast in the role of those who had a disregard for the needs of Nature.

Now of course this is not too different from what one finds in dreams. For dreams also tend to reflect cultural issues, and as soon as one gets into any kind of therapy that deals with the psyche at this deeper level of the collective unconscious, one comes to the inevitable realisation that we are not going along in our psychic life, you know, just in a realm of interpersonal relationships. A very powerful culture such as ours projects huge patterns, huge conflicts and turmoils, and we all experience them, although we may not be conscious of their inner meaning at all. In this sense, Humankind is still enormously alienated; the point is, it doesn't happen just in Washington and Moscow - it happens within the psyche of the whole people. The political spokesmen are only giving voice to what is going on in all the individuals...

This brings up the question of myth-form. You see, the big problems facing society are perceived in symbolic, mythic expression, and for this reason their resolution takes place on the symbolic, mythic level as well. If there's work going on in a culture to reorganise itself, then it's a process that must occur on both levels simultaneously: individuals will go through their personal visions, and collective spokesmen will express collective visions, which get worked out and implemented on a cultural level.

Source: Mental Breakdown as Healing


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Should you be so inclined, these articles are also of relevance:

- The Role of Metaphor

- The Experience of Schizophrenia

[Fathergia]

pachyderm I have to agree with you to an extent. Abuse is different to everyone and to some people things are more abusive then others. I have (for some reason) a hang up about getting yelled at. Everytime I get yelled at I burst into tears no matter how much I try not to. Wheares I can be hit and beat and it doesn't affect me as bad. However we have a traditonal idea of abuse being physical or sexual not verbal. For me abuse is verbal and my Dad yells at me a lot ever since I was a little kid. So here I am...with the suspection of being a Schizo makes sense...
P.S.. Pachyderm I like your name it means "fish skin" I think because Pachy=fish Derm=Skin(I think) Did you know this or did you think it was original sounding? Or were you making a reference to the disease.