Is paranoia psychosis ?

Hello everybody, I have suffered from paranoia with anxiety and fear, that my neighbor persecuting me. Is this psychosis ?

I won't diagnose, but I will provide my personal exprerience and how the two relate in myself.

Outside of psychosis, paranoia may still occur. For example you may ask yourself what if someone you know is persecuting you, or may have evidence that they are to some degree and then ask yourself what could they be doing that you don't know about? However, this will likely be somewhat in the background of your day to day living, just seen as a concern left off to the side that doesn't require immediate attention, but may require monitoring for signs that something is going to go down.

Psychosis is when the process becomes all consuming. It is sometimes possible to pinpoint to the second when psychosis has occured, because of a distinct feeling that "sh*t just got real!". Suddenly you are overtaken by a bizarre feeling, as if something of great significance were occuring, and your previous paranoid musings may well be central to the process. At this point, you can think and speak of little else but what is going on (in your mind). Whether or not the paranoid ideas are held onto with certainty or not, they are certainly seen as so important that they must be focused upon to the exclusion of all else, known as a "break from reality", or if you do manage to distract yourself from them, may instead turn to "if it is not [paranoid theory] going on, then what is?". The occurrence happening to you may be given spiritual significance, or seen in terms of the development of your entire timeline. While psychotic, your general behaviour may also be different from usual, and perhaps quite unstable. If you have a lot of insight, you will understand at the time that what is happening to you is not simply a reaction to an objective situation, but is a mostly internal process of psychological change, and it is this psychological phenomenon, not the paranoia itself, which is the essence of the psychosis.

So, if this feeling of paranoid anxiety seems to be more or less constant, and is occupying your thoughts so much that you appear to be treating it as real, and your behaviour is changing as a result, and even if you stop thinking about it, you still get a strong feeling of "something going on" that you will interpret via some other unconventional means... then I would say it could quite possibly be psychosis, however I cannot say for sure. I know when I personally am psychotic and when I am just paranoid, but it is hard to describe exactly what the difference is, as it is a very subjective change, so it is hard to know unless you already know, you know?

Yea scattered ashes its quite difficult to describe or it is psychosis or not. In my experience I felt big paranoia that it consumed all my mind, anxiety was so big, that it seemed my head will explode. I was aware of it and I didn't have a break from reality though. But it was scary, till I was hospitalized later.

ernaa wrote:Yea scattered ashes its quite difficult to describe or it is psychosis or not. In my experience I felt big paranoia that it consumed all my mind, anxiety was so big, that it seemed my head will explode. I was aware of it and I didn't have a break from reality though. But it was scary, till I was hospitalized later.

I don't know if I ever had a break from reality, as I don't know what this would even mean. Certainly my experiences were out of the ordinary though. It was as if there was a secret hidden meaning behind everything I experienced, and everything could be related back to my life. It certainly felt like people were giving me hidden messages, but now I believe that this is because we all share the experience of being human, and my mind was simply picking up on patterns between my environment and myself.

If you define psychosis as a loss of contact with reality, then paranoia that is extreme enough to tip the scales on reality would be considered psychosis. There is a term "persecutory type" of delusions, which are essentially paranoid delusions. The DSM V describes persecutory type (pg91-92) as: The central theme of the delusion involves the individual's belief of being conspired against, cheated, spied on, followed, poisoned, maliciously maligned, harassed, or obstructed in the pursuit of long-term goals.

It could be psychosis, but not necessarily. It would probably depend on the extent to which you think your neighbor is against you. Is your neighbor ever friendly? Not to say that this defines it, but if you are still finding reasons to doubt your neighbor despite normal type interactions then it seems more like psychosis.

Psychosis I believe is defined as either hallucinations (which this is not), or delusions which are not grinded in reality. Delusions are defined as persistent beliefs that have no grouding in reality.

You could meet with a psychologist/psychiatrist to discuss the issue. Honestly whether it's a delusion or not if you are really irked by it you should probably meet with someone to discuss it.