Who Are You Calling Paranoid?

Submitted by tonyplant on July 8, 2006 - 15:03.

AADT has published a funny overview of the recent findings about the level of paranoia in the UK. They quote the BBC account of the statistics that paranoia is nearly as common as anxiety and depression and comment:

Their statistics paint a picture of a nation not quite teetering on the brink of tin foil hat sales and mass hysteria, but still facing an unexpectedly large problem.

I haven't read the original paper but AADT quotes:

• Over 40% of people regularly worry that negative comments are being made about them
• 27% think that people deliberately try to irritate them
• 20% worry about being observed or followed
• 10% think that someone has it in for them
• 5% worry that there is a conspiracy to harm them

I've no idea what the comparable figures are for other countries but it would be a fascinating comparison!

A while ago, Dr. Sanity’s offered a tongue-in-cheek account of command hallucinations. I rather blithely suggested that we need a Happystance to resist these strong command hallucinations and to provide us with personal and social resilience in the face of all the dire news that confronts us on a regular basis. As a consumer of media reporting, I sometimes feel that a lot of it implies that I am been governed by idiots who are incapable of concealing their disdain for me by covering up their attempts to deceive me on matters great and small. Possibly not a fair characterisation, but I'm not sure that media reporting is always a fair characterisation of the issues, people and stories.

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