The Social Context of Paranoia

Abstract

‘Psychiatry’, suggests Hornstein (2009a: 6), ‘is the most contested field in medicine’ and, as Bracken and Thomas (2001: 724) note, ‘[i]t is hard to imagine the emergence of “antipaediatrics” or “critical anaesthetics” movements’. But why is this so? One of the reasons is that there is often a fundamental disagreement about the meaning attributed to experience and, who has the right to confer that meaning. Experiences like paranoia are often decontextualized and stripped of meaning. For example, psychiatry variously classifies paranoia as a subtype of schizophrenia, a separate delusional disorder or as a type of personality disorder. Yet arcane discussions of the differences between diagnostic subtypes distract from commonalities in the way paranoia is experienced.