Paranoia: Therapeutic Approach and Modality

NURS 6645: Psychopathology and Diagnostic Reasoning
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Personality traits represent individuals' thoughts, behavior, perception, and interaction patterns that often become consistent over time as a person matures. However, these characteristics are known as personality disorders when they become obvious, maladaptive, and rigid to the extent of limiting an individual's ability to interact with others (Paris, 2015). People who exhibit such social maladaptation frequently go through severe distress, which adversely effect on their health.
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5th edition (DSM-5-TR), several personality disorders fall into the A, B, and C clusters based on their shared traits. One of the personality disorders is paranoia. A paranoid person has a persistent habit of suspicion and mistrust of other people (Bates, 2018). The following are the paranoid disorder diagnostic criteria according to DSM-5-TR. Typically, individuals who suffer from this condition have strong reasons to be suspicious of others and their motivations. They have unjustified fears that someone is targeting them and unfounded doubts about other people's reliability. Additionally, such individuals never feel comfortable sharing knowledge with others out of an unjustified concern that it would be utilized maliciously against them. Besides, they constantly hold grudges because they are fiercely offended by slights or insults. However, diagnosing paranoid patients is easy because they neither experience other mental disorders nor exhibit physiological repercussions from other medical conditions.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a beneficial therapeutic strategy in treating a person with the paranoid disorder. CBT is a helpful intervention because it looks at a person's thinking patterns and connects them to the information supporting their ideas. This approach can aid in lowering anxiety and concern, which affect and increase paranoia-related feelings. A family therapy modality can also be successful in addressi...