So I’ve thought about paranoia in the past. I haven’t really been thinking about it recently, But I’ll try to refresh some of my thoughts on it. In terms of philosophy, Socrates has elements of paranoia such as the allegory of the cave. It is a paranoid thought that the world we perceive is not the way it seems. And to think you are a captive being presented illusions would be a paranoid delusion in most cases. Paranoia as I have experienced it, is that other people are trying to harm me and that unrelated things are connected for instance, are not like the paranoia in the cave analogy . In those I am not questioning illusions, but am being deceived by them. So I guess paranoid schizophrenics lack Socrates’ type of paranoia that what they are experiencing are illusions. So I wonder if what szs experience is actually paranoia, and what Socrates encourages is actually part of a healthy critical mind. That makes me wonder about other types of paranoia, for example about vaccines, where it is hard to determine if it is just a result of a critical mind, or if the stress of the situation is creating a low level mental health issue.
Jump ahead a couple millennia and Foucault talks about the way power works and he encourages a kind of paranoid thinking about power. The relevant one for szs is how mental health and corrections institutions might be influencing the wider society as a whole. I think about this sometimes in terms of how sz causes afflicted individuals to interact with legal-medical power and how there is a subtle discursive/ behavioral limitation we are faced with that we might only cross when we are unwell. But I think in Foucault’s paranoia this power might permeate into education and social institutions where people become arbiters of this power and a certain kind of legal-medical rationality becomes dominant and to be otherwise rational could result in negative sanction. Obviously if you are a sz with symptoms in an educational setting the legal-medical processes will likely be enacted against you in full force, but there might be more subtle sanctions that occur at other levels where the rationality behind this power is questioned or violated. As someone with sz and critical thinking I have experienced both situations of talking and acting crazy.