ABSTRACT
What terms like paranoia and paranoid should mean has exercised psychiatry for decades, if not centuries. As a noun, ‘paranoia’ denotes a disorder whose clinical features, course, boundaries with other disorders, and even existence are contentious. Used as an adjective, ‘paranoid’ has become attached to conditions ranging from paranoid schizophrenia, through paranoid depression to paranoid personality, not to mention a motley collection of ‘reactions’ and ‘states’ – and this is to restrict the discussion just to functional disorders. Even when abbreviated down to the prefix para-, it still manages to cause trouble as the stubbornly persistent concept of paraphrenia.
