paranoia, the central theme of a group of psychotic disorders characterized by systematic delusions and of the nonpsychotic paranoid personality disorder. The word paranoia was used by the ancient Greeks, apparently in much the same sense as the modern popular term insanity. Since then it has had a variety of meanings. Toward the end of the 19th century it came to mean a delusional psychosis, in which the delusions develop slowly into a complex, intricate, and logically elaborated system, without hallucination and without general personality disorganization. In contemporary psychiatric practice, the term paranoia is generally reserved for all rare, extreme cases of chronic, fixed, and highly systematized delusions. All the rest are called paranoid disorders. Some psychiatrists, however, have come to doubt the validity of paranoia as a diagnostic category, claiming that what has in the past been considered paranoia is actually a variety of schizophrenia.
One of the most common delusions in paranoid disorders is that of persecution. A chief contributing factor is an exaggerated tendency to self-reference—i.e., to systematically misinterpret remarks, gestures, and acts of others as intentional slights or as signs of derision and contempt directed at oneself. Self-reference becomes paranoid delusion when one persists in believing oneself to be the target of hostile actions or insinuations, perpetrated by some enemy or band of enemies, when this is actually not the case. The identifying marks of delusional conviction are (1) readiness to accept the flimsiest evidence in support of the belief and (2) inability to entertain seriously any evidence that contradicts it.
In addition to the common persecutory type of paranoid reaction, a number of others have been described, most notably paranoid grandiosity, or delusions of grandeur (also known as megalomania), characterized by the false belief that one is a superlative person.