Paranoid Personality Disorder is characterized by abnormal levels of distrust and extreme suspiciousness of others. While these seem to be the tell tale signs that signal the initial stages of the condition, established psychological tests and research have not been successful until recently. The developments discussed below are primarily geared toward achieving a better understanding of paranoid personality disorder symptoms to design and formulate suitable treatment methods.
1. One of the latest medical breakthroughs involves using drugs to alleviate symptoms. Though a majority of these drugs are currently awaiting approval from the FDA, clinical trials hold a lot of promise.
2. Another major medical breakthrough involves newly formulated and specially designed paranoid personality disorder tests that help psychologists and doctors correctly assess the patient’s state of mind by ruling out more serious problems like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. These tests are in the form of questionnaires that have been developed after extensive research and analysis of psychological case studies and patient profiles.
3. One of the biggest medical breakthroughs is in the realm of treatment. Idiopathic paranoia is also being studied closely to try and understand the common symptoms associated with the five principal types of paranoid personality disorder as defined by Dr. Theodore Millon. These are the fanatic paranoid, the malignant paranoid, the obdurate paranoid, the querulous paranoid, and the insular paranoid.
Physiological effects are now found to be responsible for a majority of paranoid personality disorder symptoms. Most common medical conditions that necessitate the need of paranoid personality disorder treatment have a neurological basis. These conditions include temporal lobe epilepsy.
4. While most of the symptoms of the disorder are highly disabling or distressing, these problems may also occur in combination with schizophrenia. The medical discovery that has led to the co-occurrence of these two psychological disorders opens up new doors. This has now enabled psychiatrists and medical practitioners to prescribe the same drugs that are used in the treatment of schizophrenia to deal with the problem of paranoid personality disorder too.
5. Detailed research and medical tests show that paranoid personality disorder symptoms can also occur during the course of paranoid personality disorder treatment. One of the biggest medical breakthroughs in understanding the problem has been through stress tests. Paranoid personality disorder treatment that is based along the lines of giving patients the ability and power to cope with extreme levels of stress is found to be extremely effective.
6. While very brief psychotic episodes whose average duration varies from a time span of minutes to a few hours is not uncommon, longer episodes of continued paranoid personality disorder symptoms may result in the development of delusional disorder (DD) and eventually lead to schizophrenia. One of the latest medical breakthroughs is the discovery that individuals with this disorder seem to be increasingly prone to major depressive disorder (MPD), agoraphobia, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), alcoholism, and substance-abuse problems and other related disorders.
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