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Paranoia: The Twenty-First Century Fear
Terrorists, child abductors, muggers, delinquent teenagers, malicious colleagues . . . Who wouldnt be worried? The world can be a dangerous place, for sure. But have we lost the knack of judging risk? Are we letting paranoia get the better of us? In this entertaining and thought-provoking book, based on the most up-to-date scientific research, Daniel and Jason Freeman highlight just how prominent paranoia is today. One in four of us have regular paranoid thoughts. The authors analyse the causes of paranoia, identifying the social and cultural factors that seem to be skewing the way we think and feel about the world around us. And they explain why paranoia may be on the rise and, crucially, what we can do to tackle it. Witty, clear, and compelling, Paranoia takes us beyond the tabloid headlines to pinpoint the real menace at the heart of twenty-first century culture.
198 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 17, 2010
What a potboiler! Goodreads always asks 'what did you learn from this book? and I have to say, in this case, 'very little'.
Worse, the book is a symptom of the very disease that it is allegedly trying to cure - promoting what might be called an hysteria of normalisation within an ideology of 'expert' progressivism that is probably at the root of why some people are becoming paranoid in the first place.
What is one of the most logical reasons for not trusting other persons? Almost certainly the fact that control over your own thoughts, ideas, even behaviours, is embedded in a social reality over which you feel you have little control and in which you have no stake.
This thin (in quality) book is based on often unconvincing research that mixes the usual offerings from the Institute of the Bleeding Obvious with some gross assumptions about the link between human psychology and society that have the last decade of governance by managers and experts written all over them.
There is also a slightly more sinister, if unintended, quality to the book - it starts with the now obsessive trope promoted by a certain type of metropolitan intellectual-expert with a stake in the existing system to the effect that conspiracy theory is the problem rather than the society in which conspiracy theory flourishes.
Elsewhere, we have pointed out the social function of conspiracy theory as a form of psychological protest against rule by elites who set the terms of their own dominance. This is the modern equivalent of, say, the use of grimoires and magic against the claims of the priestly class. They may not be 'true' but there is not much more 'truth' in the claims of those who try to tell people what is right behaviour and right language and, eventually, right thought.
This book stands at the ideological peak of that worst aspect of the Enlightenment project - the demand that people choose normality and rationality and be guided in this matter by people whose dessicated vision of humanity is purely material and scientific.
I really cannot take this book very seriously. I am waiting for the book that truly explores the relationship between the sheer variety of brain structures available to humanity, their rights to self determination and the good society that is centred on relieving distress, ensuring personal security and permitting maximum creativity without promoting the value of normality or variation from the norm as disease. This is not that book.
As for the authors' 'solutions' - they fall into three types: the problem of the media (where they have no solution); a vague wishy-washy 'third way' social and economic progressivism, overseen as rule by managers and therapists, one that we have just kicked out of office in the UK precisely because it made us so miserable; and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which has serious merit so long as the will to use it comes from the person (not a 'patient') rather than be imposed by the community as a whole demanding health as a social duty.
The inability to understand how society really works is the worst flaw of this book. Paranoia simply fills an information gap and, though unhelpful and distracting from the real issues of improving one's life and environment, it does bring us back to considering such issues as the basis for trust when we cannot know other minds, when volatility is the normal state of social interaction and when there really is clear evidence (and this is not paranoia) that self interest and greed do result in effective small scale endemic 'conspiracies' against the public interest.
The creation of New Labour which ruled this land for twelve years was a conspiracy of sorts in this sense. Lazy collusion between inspectors and oil companies in North America is a form of collusive conspiracy. And the informal dialogue between academics looking for funding with politicians and civil servants who want quick fix solutions to intractable problems is yet another.
It is not paranoid to say that society actually runs on collusive co-operation between self-defined 'experts' who find it difficult to separate their personal interests from the public interest and that this intermeshing of soft conspiracy as a means of doing business is something that the wider public notes and, without understanding the mechanisms involved, resents.
The ideological normalisers (such as the Freemans) want us to trust 'authority' when authority is inherently untrustworthy because it is human-all-too-human and is no better in its ability to judge and model the world accurately than its subjects. Conspiracy theory is absurd but the exercise of power is equally absurd.
As for the media, if it behaves irresponsibly in the arbitrage of information in society (and it does), it is because power refuses to provide full information to the public and treats its constituents like objects for management. The population at large are looking for narratives that will express their growing 'ressentiment' at being pulled from pillar to post by people who quite clearly are not as clever as they are cracked up to be and are not as disinterested either.
As for the evidence for some of the claims in the book, they remind me of similar books making vast claims on human nature from a surprisingly small number of experiments on animal behaviour using theories of human nature that treat all persons as automata at all times.
The very fact of an experiment creates an anomalous circumstance in the minds of participants. There quite simply is no ethical scientific way of producing sufficient psychological data regarding minds in social contexts that can be anything more than suggestive.
The attempt to promote a career in science is prone to claims that are overplayed and certain behaviours are given value simply because most people seem to do such-and-such on most observable occasions. Such work can never tell us what any one person will do on any one particular occasion nor the effect of awareness of the effect on consequent behaviour nor what value to put on the behaviour.
Milgram's famour experiments probably do demonstrate a default position of humanity in accepting the idiot commands of men in white coats or black uniforms but not all men accepted the idiot commands. The idiot commands were placed in an ideological environment which over-valued science as a matter of trust and a proportion of persons, faced with a presentation of the default position, can and have reacted by becoming rightfully more suspicious of men in white coats and men in black uniforms.
At least now some of these latter will know that if they do an evil act and are not forced into it, they can enjoy their own sadism instead of slinking into the position of transferring responsibility to 'authority'.
This book is filled with assertions of knowledge based on the great God Science that have nothing of the relative certainty that we can get from physics or metallurgy.
A great deal of social scientific 'judgement' presupposes that default positions and the normal are somehow reflective of what should be or, if morally upsetting, require intervention to change normality, with a gross confusion of categories between issues of mental health, self-determination, social and economic organisation and the nature of power - precisely the same confusion of categories that brought our country almost to its knees in recent years.
There is no attempt here to ask what the functional purpose of mental states are to the person experiencing them or to investigate the right of persons to construct non-rational misperceptions of objective reality in order to maintain their selves in otherwise intolerable environments.
This is not to argue against liberation from internal constraints by any means but, except in cases of real psychic distress (and most people get along fine most of the time despite the attempts to medicalise humanity by special interests), there is no value in replacing a slavery to the weaknesses of one's own mind or an existing slavery to the social construction of reality by other minds with a new slavery to a new social construction of reality by experts who demand certain thought patterns as the price of 'happiness' This is the Soma world of Huxley by the back door.
The Freemans, to be fair, do understand the social and economic preconditions for real individuation (whose character is really one of permitting choices and escape from bonds that no longer function for the psyche) but they end up with a utopian social democratic model that looks set to create precisely those bonds for the psyche that it wants to escape. The crack at Thatcher near the end (and I am no supporter of hers) is simply unnecessary and reveals the prejudice of the writers.
More to the point, there are now no resources for this material paradise so effort should go on liberating persons to make informed choices - and enabling wider knowledge and availability of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to individuals who wish to transform themselves on their terms.
The story of Robert Chapman's willed determination to work out his extreme (and clinical) paranoia is very interesting but it is anomalous and presupposes an inherent quality of will in the man. If the Freemans had spent more time on the issues surrounding the will and the re-evaluation of paranoid thinking as useful to the person rather than with padding out the book with social psychological assertions and wish lists, this might have remained in the library.
In fact, socially, we may have a new problem emerging which is that the work of the Freemans and others have created such a 'snobbisme' about conspiracy that 'normal' (actually quite abnormal) 'haute-bourgeois' intellectuals, journalists and politicians feel that they will be ridiculed if they do not take at face value some of the self-serving explanations of the rest of the elite of which they are a part.
I am not in the slightest paranoid but I do, professionally, deal in conspiracies in the sense that, sometimes, I have clients in business who are the subject of direct, malicious attack for reasons that are not always apparent.
These are 'conspiracies' and, once you know the reason, you can take measures to deal with the matter but it is sometimes difficult to get normal, rational, highly educated people to understand that there are people out there whose profession is to manipulate memes and public information for special interest reasons. They will say that this is 'conspiracy thinking' as if some small-time shark placing dirt in the media is to be positioned alongside the idea that lizards from Sirius have taken over Windsor Castle.
The denial of the surprising degree of social and political manipulation, using the willing dupes of the media, by states, political interests and commercial lobbyists is as absurd as the promotion of the lizards from Sirius as inhabiting positions of earthly power.
The paranoid mentality (condemned since Hoftstadter's somewhat patrician East Coast extended sneer at the populism of the ordinary man struggling to make sense of his crumbling world) has its survival benefits against conservative elites and left-wing intellectuals alike.
To their credit, the Freemans see the connection between poverty, deprivation and paranoid thinking but they do not understand it. Their complaint is that of all left-wing urban intellectuals. It is wrong because it is not 'rational' without comprehending that their own rationality is a weapon of power against the self-determination of others - and that it acts to ensure that they are 'servitors' of a system that is flawed and is seen to be flawed by its victims. Social democracy and expert-led universalist ideology is just not enough any more ...
By the time we get to the conclusion of the book, the authors are admitting that they really do not know a great deal about paranoia after all ... "... sadly we simply don't have the data to say for certain whether paranoia is increasing." Er, yes, well! But the claim is certainly that "paranoia is much more prevalent in society than most of us, including the scientific and medical establishment, had suspected." Sorry but not proven!
The authors certainly need a healthy dose of M. Foucault at this point since I am sure that they are not entirely aware of their own complicity in redefining the terms of their subject in order to redefine humanity.
Paranoia, in the end, is just stupidity but its harm depends on where you sit - what is a stupid analysis about society (for example, the nonsense about terrorist threats against us individuals when the real threat is against the structures of power of the elite) may be a survival mechanism for the person while a stupid understanding of the person may be what society needs to function properly.
The cat is let out of the bag on the final page. Yes, say, the Freemans, paranoia can be beaten but "to do so requires measures targeted at society as a whole, and at individuals. Governments must play the major role with the former. We need a range of policies to raise public awareness of paranoia; train therapists; and tackle the effects of potentially damaging social and economic trends."
Oh, bugger! State intervention to manage the conditions of our minds, a Psychological-Bureaucratic Complex to compete for our taxes with the Military-Industrial one - but certainly lots of jobs for the psychological 'profession'.
That's just what we need, more expenditires on exhortatory behaviour modification, more therapists and more bureaucrats to oversee the process. Nudged into happiness by experts. What a depressing little tome.
Worse, the book is a symptom of the very disease that it is allegedly trying to cure - promoting what might be called an hysteria of normalisation within an ideology of 'expert' progressivism that is probably at the root of why some people are becoming paranoid in the first place.
What is one of the most logical reasons for not trusting other persons? Almost certainly the fact that control over your own thoughts, ideas, even behaviours, is embedded in a social reality over which you feel you have little control and in which you have no stake.
This thin (in quality) book is based on often unconvincing research that mixes the usual offerings from the Institute of the Bleeding Obvious with some gross assumptions about the link between human psychology and society that have the last decade of governance by managers and experts written all over them.
There is also a slightly more sinister, if unintended, quality to the book - it starts with the now obsessive trope promoted by a certain type of metropolitan intellectual-expert with a stake in the existing system to the effect that conspiracy theory is the problem rather than the society in which conspiracy theory flourishes.
Elsewhere, we have pointed out the social function of conspiracy theory as a form of psychological protest against rule by elites who set the terms of their own dominance. This is the modern equivalent of, say, the use of grimoires and magic against the claims of the priestly class. They may not be 'true' but there is not much more 'truth' in the claims of those who try to tell people what is right behaviour and right language and, eventually, right thought.
This book stands at the ideological peak of that worst aspect of the Enlightenment project - the demand that people choose normality and rationality and be guided in this matter by people whose dessicated vision of humanity is purely material and scientific.
I really cannot take this book very seriously. I am waiting for the book that truly explores the relationship between the sheer variety of brain structures available to humanity, their rights to self determination and the good society that is centred on relieving distress, ensuring personal security and permitting maximum creativity without promoting the value of normality or variation from the norm as disease. This is not that book.
As for the authors' 'solutions' - they fall into three types: the problem of the media (where they have no solution); a vague wishy-washy 'third way' social and economic progressivism, overseen as rule by managers and therapists, one that we have just kicked out of office in the UK precisely because it made us so miserable; and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which has serious merit so long as the will to use it comes from the person (not a 'patient') rather than be imposed by the community as a whole demanding health as a social duty.
The inability to understand how society really works is the worst flaw of this book. Paranoia simply fills an information gap and, though unhelpful and distracting from the real issues of improving one's life and environment, it does bring us back to considering such issues as the basis for trust when we cannot know other minds, when volatility is the normal state of social interaction and when there really is clear evidence (and this is not paranoia) that self interest and greed do result in effective small scale endemic 'conspiracies' against the public interest.
The creation of New Labour which ruled this land for twelve years was a conspiracy of sorts in this sense. Lazy collusion between inspectors and oil companies in North America is a form of collusive conspiracy. And the informal dialogue between academics looking for funding with politicians and civil servants who want quick fix solutions to intractable problems is yet another.
It is not paranoid to say that society actually runs on collusive co-operation between self-defined 'experts' who find it difficult to separate their personal interests from the public interest and that this intermeshing of soft conspiracy as a means of doing business is something that the wider public notes and, without understanding the mechanisms involved, resents.
The ideological normalisers (such as the Freemans) want us to trust 'authority' when authority is inherently untrustworthy because it is human-all-too-human and is no better in its ability to judge and model the world accurately than its subjects. Conspiracy theory is absurd but the exercise of power is equally absurd.
As for the media, if it behaves irresponsibly in the arbitrage of information in society (and it does), it is because power refuses to provide full information to the public and treats its constituents like objects for management. The population at large are looking for narratives that will express their growing 'ressentiment' at being pulled from pillar to post by people who quite clearly are not as clever as they are cracked up to be and are not as disinterested either.
As for the evidence for some of the claims in the book, they remind me of similar books making vast claims on human nature from a surprisingly small number of experiments on animal behaviour using theories of human nature that treat all persons as automata at all times.
The very fact of an experiment creates an anomalous circumstance in the minds of participants. There quite simply is no ethical scientific way of producing sufficient psychological data regarding minds in social contexts that can be anything more than suggestive.
The attempt to promote a career in science is prone to claims that are overplayed and certain behaviours are given value simply because most people seem to do such-and-such on most observable occasions. Such work can never tell us what any one person will do on any one particular occasion nor the effect of awareness of the effect on consequent behaviour nor what value to put on the behaviour.
Milgram's famour experiments probably do demonstrate a default position of humanity in accepting the idiot commands of men in white coats or black uniforms but not all men accepted the idiot commands. The idiot commands were placed in an ideological environment which over-valued science as a matter of trust and a proportion of persons, faced with a presentation of the default position, can and have reacted by becoming rightfully more suspicious of men in white coats and men in black uniforms.
At least now some of these latter will know that if they do an evil act and are not forced into it, they can enjoy their own sadism instead of slinking into the position of transferring responsibility to 'authority'.
This book is filled with assertions of knowledge based on the great God Science that have nothing of the relative certainty that we can get from physics or metallurgy.
A great deal of social scientific 'judgement' presupposes that default positions and the normal are somehow reflective of what should be or, if morally upsetting, require intervention to change normality, with a gross confusion of categories between issues of mental health, self-determination, social and economic organisation and the nature of power - precisely the same confusion of categories that brought our country almost to its knees in recent years.
There is no attempt here to ask what the functional purpose of mental states are to the person experiencing them or to investigate the right of persons to construct non-rational misperceptions of objective reality in order to maintain their selves in otherwise intolerable environments.
This is not to argue against liberation from internal constraints by any means but, except in cases of real psychic distress (and most people get along fine most of the time despite the attempts to medicalise humanity by special interests), there is no value in replacing a slavery to the weaknesses of one's own mind or an existing slavery to the social construction of reality by other minds with a new slavery to a new social construction of reality by experts who demand certain thought patterns as the price of 'happiness' This is the Soma world of Huxley by the back door.
The Freemans, to be fair, do understand the social and economic preconditions for real individuation (whose character is really one of permitting choices and escape from bonds that no longer function for the psyche) but they end up with a utopian social democratic model that looks set to create precisely those bonds for the psyche that it wants to escape. The crack at Thatcher near the end (and I am no supporter of hers) is simply unnecessary and reveals the prejudice of the writers.
More to the point, there are now no resources for this material paradise so effort should go on liberating persons to make informed choices - and enabling wider knowledge and availability of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to individuals who wish to transform themselves on their terms.
The story of Robert Chapman's willed determination to work out his extreme (and clinical) paranoia is very interesting but it is anomalous and presupposes an inherent quality of will in the man. If the Freemans had spent more time on the issues surrounding the will and the re-evaluation of paranoid thinking as useful to the person rather than with padding out the book with social psychological assertions and wish lists, this might have remained in the library.
In fact, socially, we may have a new problem emerging which is that the work of the Freemans and others have created such a 'snobbisme' about conspiracy that 'normal' (actually quite abnormal) 'haute-bourgeois' intellectuals, journalists and politicians feel that they will be ridiculed if they do not take at face value some of the self-serving explanations of the rest of the elite of which they are a part.
I am not in the slightest paranoid but I do, professionally, deal in conspiracies in the sense that, sometimes, I have clients in business who are the subject of direct, malicious attack for reasons that are not always apparent.
These are 'conspiracies' and, once you know the reason, you can take measures to deal with the matter but it is sometimes difficult to get normal, rational, highly educated people to understand that there are people out there whose profession is to manipulate memes and public information for special interest reasons. They will say that this is 'conspiracy thinking' as if some small-time shark placing dirt in the media is to be positioned alongside the idea that lizards from Sirius have taken over Windsor Castle.
The denial of the surprising degree of social and political manipulation, using the willing dupes of the media, by states, political interests and commercial lobbyists is as absurd as the promotion of the lizards from Sirius as inhabiting positions of earthly power.
The paranoid mentality (condemned since Hoftstadter's somewhat patrician East Coast extended sneer at the populism of the ordinary man struggling to make sense of his crumbling world) has its survival benefits against conservative elites and left-wing intellectuals alike.
To their credit, the Freemans see the connection between poverty, deprivation and paranoid thinking but they do not understand it. Their complaint is that of all left-wing urban intellectuals. It is wrong because it is not 'rational' without comprehending that their own rationality is a weapon of power against the self-determination of others - and that it acts to ensure that they are 'servitors' of a system that is flawed and is seen to be flawed by its victims. Social democracy and expert-led universalist ideology is just not enough any more ...
By the time we get to the conclusion of the book, the authors are admitting that they really do not know a great deal about paranoia after all ... "... sadly we simply don't have the data to say for certain whether paranoia is increasing." Er, yes, well! But the claim is certainly that "paranoia is much more prevalent in society than most of us, including the scientific and medical establishment, had suspected." Sorry but not proven!
The authors certainly need a healthy dose of M. Foucault at this point since I am sure that they are not entirely aware of their own complicity in redefining the terms of their subject in order to redefine humanity.
Paranoia, in the end, is just stupidity but its harm depends on where you sit - what is a stupid analysis about society (for example, the nonsense about terrorist threats against us individuals when the real threat is against the structures of power of the elite) may be a survival mechanism for the person while a stupid understanding of the person may be what society needs to function properly.
The cat is let out of the bag on the final page. Yes, say, the Freemans, paranoia can be beaten but "to do so requires measures targeted at society as a whole, and at individuals. Governments must play the major role with the former. We need a range of policies to raise public awareness of paranoia; train therapists; and tackle the effects of potentially damaging social and economic trends."
Oh, bugger! State intervention to manage the conditions of our minds, a Psychological-Bureaucratic Complex to compete for our taxes with the Military-Industrial one - but certainly lots of jobs for the psychological 'profession'.
That's just what we need, more expenditires on exhortatory behaviour modification, more therapists and more bureaucrats to oversee the process. Nudged into happiness by experts. What a depressing little tome.
July 17, 2017
This book was not at all what I expected.
I thought this would be an honest portrayal of why we are so paranoid. The books starts off explaining that paranoia is indeed common place, that everyone has paranoid feelings at some point in their life - that it only gets harmful when we become obsessed by these paranoid thoughts. A little Paranoia test is given in chapter two, which gave me the results of not paranoid - yet from the text I certainly felt like I am a rather paranoid person.
Instead of the authors taking a firm stand on why we are so paranoid these days- what was provided somewhat unresolved. They comment that we know more about mishaps that we are not as trusting as we once were, despite the facts of the likelihood of crime for example - but the way it is presented, they make it sound like its all misguided fear. No, it's really not. And if the media, who is ultimately controlling so many aspects of our comprehension is instilling false fears - then we as a people really need to be demanding better news and reporting. This book made me feel, instead of waking people up to the injustices done by corporations, politicians, and the media and doing something about it - that we should just accept it or the people that have fears are misguided. I don't think that people are misguided and many times have reasons for feeling as such. What needs to happen is how we can collectively bring out the truths and squash future fears... we need to continue to learn and communicate to one another... the authors do not resolve anything and instead make paranoia an individual problem instead of something that is outwardly inflicted on us.
I thought this would be an honest portrayal of why we are so paranoid. The books starts off explaining that paranoia is indeed common place, that everyone has paranoid feelings at some point in their life - that it only gets harmful when we become obsessed by these paranoid thoughts. A little Paranoia test is given in chapter two, which gave me the results of not paranoid - yet from the text I certainly felt like I am a rather paranoid person.
Instead of the authors taking a firm stand on why we are so paranoid these days- what was provided somewhat unresolved. They comment that we know more about mishaps that we are not as trusting as we once were, despite the facts of the likelihood of crime for example - but the way it is presented, they make it sound like its all misguided fear. No, it's really not. And if the media, who is ultimately controlling so many aspects of our comprehension is instilling false fears - then we as a people really need to be demanding better news and reporting. This book made me feel, instead of waking people up to the injustices done by corporations, politicians, and the media and doing something about it - that we should just accept it or the people that have fears are misguided. I don't think that people are misguided and many times have reasons for feeling as such. What needs to happen is how we can collectively bring out the truths and squash future fears... we need to continue to learn and communicate to one another... the authors do not resolve anything and instead make paranoia an individual problem instead of something that is outwardly inflicted on us.
October 1, 2020
Concise examination around the burgeoning phenomena of ‘paranoia’, the modern world is becoming entrenched in.
Well written, and referencing across politics, economics and the media when looking for causes, whilst finishing off with strategies to reduce such thought processes.
Well written, and referencing across politics, economics and the media when looking for causes, whilst finishing off with strategies to reduce such thought processes.
Read
April 3, 2024just wanna read a fun book 😭
November 3, 2014
Paranoid thoughts are more common than most people believe… or at least happen more often than they are treated. I know that as a child, I was pretty sure that my belief that someone in my family might decide to kill me was untrue, but I made sure to never eat food that no one else was eating, just in case. “No sense in making it easy to poison me,” I figured. This caused no disorder in my life and I didn’t really dwell on the idea… I just exhibited a little behavior that I felt helped keep me safe.
The most interesting point I found in this well-written, short but informative book is that paranoia is correlated with jumping to conclusions with less evidence than average. One story told about a man who was starting to suffer from schizophrenia and worked consciously to retrain his mind to look for evidence contrary to any thoughts that started to overwhelm him. If you look only for evidence that supports your own thoughts – especially paranoid ones – then you are likely to find that support. It takes training and practice to look for evidence contrary to one’s own beliefs.
Paranoia is becoming far more common as our environment (urban, disconnected, rich in examples of exploiting trust), so this malady is going to need to be faced soon. This book does a great job of explaining what most everyone has experienced, and how it falls on a spectrum of paranoid thinking.
The most interesting point I found in this well-written, short but informative book is that paranoia is correlated with jumping to conclusions with less evidence than average. One story told about a man who was starting to suffer from schizophrenia and worked consciously to retrain his mind to look for evidence contrary to any thoughts that started to overwhelm him. If you look only for evidence that supports your own thoughts – especially paranoid ones – then you are likely to find that support. It takes training and practice to look for evidence contrary to one’s own beliefs.
Paranoia is becoming far more common as our environment (urban, disconnected, rich in examples of exploiting trust), so this malady is going to need to be faced soon. This book does a great job of explaining what most everyone has experienced, and how it falls on a spectrum of paranoid thinking.
December 2, 2016
Highlights for the first time the astonishing prevalence of paranoia in society today.
Explores what paranoia is, what causes it, the thoughts and feelings associated with it, and how we can deal with them
Takes a scientific perspective on paranoia in society: asking whether we are more paranoid now than we used to be, and what can be done to reduce the amount of paranoia in society
Accessible and authoritative: co-written by one of the world 's leading psychologists of paranoia, and presenting the cutting-edge of psychological thinking on the topic
Highly topical: our fears about terrorists, criminals, paedophiles, and conspiracy theories are a constant presence in the media
Explores the role of stress, anxiety, drugs, and sleep deprivation on paranoid thoughts
Includes short questionnaires for the reader to test their own levels of paranoia
Explores what paranoia is, what causes it, the thoughts and feelings associated with it, and how we can deal with them
Takes a scientific perspective on paranoia in society: asking whether we are more paranoid now than we used to be, and what can be done to reduce the amount of paranoia in society
Accessible and authoritative: co-written by one of the world 's leading psychologists of paranoia, and presenting the cutting-edge of psychological thinking on the topic
Highly topical: our fears about terrorists, criminals, paedophiles, and conspiracy theories are a constant presence in the media
Explores the role of stress, anxiety, drugs, and sleep deprivation on paranoid thoughts
Includes short questionnaires for the reader to test their own levels of paranoia
January 12, 2010
I recently completed a set of classes in Mental Health First aid; so I was primed and ready for a book like this. Daniel and Jason Freeman do a very good job of describing the spectrum of paranoia from baseless suspicions to full-blown persecutory delusions. Their examination of the possible causes of paranoia and the ways psychologists are exploring this issue was also very interesting. If you have much contact with The Public, I recommend that you read this book for a greater understanding of where some of your customers are coming from.
Read
April 12, 2014One of the best books I've read lately ~
March 29, 2015
Very interesting summary of a larger topic, however a bit too heavy on the societal variables at points, to my taste. - explicit discussions on policy.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews