“When you have PPD the whole world becomes a sinister and threatening place.”

When people talk about paranoia, I don’t think they realise how all-consuming and life-limiting it can be. I have been told by my psychiatrist that I have at least traits of Paranoid Personality Disorder (PPD), if not the full condition, and if I’m honest I don’t know how much worse it would need to get for me to fulfil all of the criteria to qualify for a PPD diagnosis.

I think most people have experienced paranoia at some stage of their lives. For me, it’s constant and it never goes away. Paranoid Personality Disorder absolutely rules my life.

One  of the things I get asked about a lot is where my paranoia stems from. It’s hard to say exactly but as with most mental health conditions, it’s probably got something to do with my childhood.

My mum was very neurotic and I led quite a sheltered existence when I was younger. My mum was always watching the news and fretting over all the badness in the world, which then affected how myself and my siblings were treated.

I was never allowed to play out in the street with my friends, go to friends’ houses, go to parties, join any clubs or activities or really have any kind of life of my own. I wasn’t even allowed on overnight school trips or to use public transport. Independence and freedom were a distant dream, such was my mum’s fear that if we were out of sight, something could happen to us. We only socialised at school.

Maybe because of my mum’s influence, I think I’ve always had a degree of paranoia. The most enduring paranoid thoughts I have are around personal security. I have a huge and disproportionate fear of being a victim of crime. I have intrusive and obsessive thoughts around being burgled and I have set rituals I have to follow in terms of house security to ensure that the risk is as low as possible, however this still doesn’t stop me being extremely paranoid about being broken into.

At the moment I have housemates which helps a little, but when I have been by myself before the paranoia has been so bad that I’ve had massive meltdowns and become hysterical, and I’ve also been known to stay up all night to ‘guard’ the property.

One of my worst triggers is door to door salespeople. I hated anyone coming to my home uninvited when I lived alone, and if it’s someone I don’t know my anxiety goes off the scale. Normally I won’t answer the door but there have been times when I’ve mistaken them for a delivery and it’s immediately sparked my fear of home invasion. If someone knocks my door it sends me into overdrive with fear that they are going to barge past me into the house. Even if I order something online I have to collect it from another location. It drives my housemates insane that I won’t open the door when they have parcels delivered.

In the past I have had times where I’ve been almost bullied into handing over my contact details to salespeople and they have harassed me with nonstop calls. I’ve then become really anxious that they are spying on me and gone through phases of being at home with all the windows and doors locked and curtains drawn, and then physically hidden to stop them seeing I’m home.

But it’s not just at home where I have the irrational fear of crime. I also fear being attacked in the street. Whenever I leave the house, I immediately feel on edge and anxious. I’m constantly scanning my environment to try and work out who could be a threat. If someone brushes past me, my heart leaps into my mouth and I immediately think I’m going to be mugged. If someone is walking slightly too close to me, I get very uncomfortable and start to panic that I’m going to get attacked or assaulted. It’s so bad that if someone makes eye contact with me in the street, I assume they are going to ‘target’ me.

It makes leaving the house incredibly stressful. If I see a group of men or youths, I will immediately change direction to avoid them in case they follow me or draw attention to me somehow- I have even been known to hide before. Cars driving slowly alongside the kerb where I’m walking is a huge trigger as well. Even if the car is just crawling along in traffic, my mind jumps to the conclusion that I’m going to get abducted. I now rarely go out. It makes me too anxious- I’m either out of the house and paranoid I’m going to be attacked, or in the house and paranoid I’ll be burgled. I can’t win.

Obviously this decision to hide away has cost me friends, but to be honest I had few anyway. PPD isn’t a great foundation for friendships. Because of the issues I spoke about above, I won’t go to unfamiliar environments or settings nor put myself in situations where I might have to meet new people, so this makes socialising impossible.

Even amongst the friends I do have, I am often convinced that they are talking about me behind my back. My most common paranoid thought is that I’ve done something wrong or embarrassing and everyone is judging me or laughing at me in secret and I don’t know about it. I’ve been told I come across as cold, aloof and condescending which is my defence mechanism for dealing with paranoia around new people. Therapy has helped me to realise this is probably a misguided attempt at trying to show that I’m strong enough not to be messed with by other people to put them off doing the things I’m paranoid about.

Dating with PPD is impossible. I always assume the worst in men and that they are cheating on me or secretly on the lookout for my replacement. I never trust what they say to me and always assume they have an ulterior motive. This makes me guarded and suspicious and for obvious reasons puts men off getting to know me.

I have had a couple of serious relationships at points in time when the paranoia wasn’t as out of control as it is now. I still experienced the same problems as described above and I’m not proud to say that I snooped to try and find evidence of my suspicions.

It’s not just relationships that are a big problem either. Work can be a massive challenge. I am aware that my paranoia is not normal nor socially acceptable, so I ‘mask’ a lot at work, but I am also quite withdrawn and don’t really encourage interaction in case people ‘pick up’ on my odd behaviour. Luckily in my job, it’s quite isolated work anyway so people don’t really notice my lack of participation.

My biggest fear is losing my job and so a lot of my paranoia is centred around that. I tend to think people are plotting against me to get me in trouble and just as it is with friends, I assume my workmates are laughing at me behind my back too and I am oblivious to the reason why.

I also assume that whenever I speak to people they think I’m lying to them, so I find myself going out of my way to prove I’m not. This makes my conversations very odd as sometimes I include a lot of unnecessary detail to back up what I’m saying, or collecting ‘evidence’ to prove what I’m saying.

This kind of ties in to the fears I have that colleagues are trying to get me into trouble. It safeguards against any allegations being made against me if I can already back up everything I say/do. Sometimes I will get emails about certain things that have gone on or are not being done correctly and I immediately assume they are referring to me. I then presume a colleague has ‘tipped off’ the boss about me. I also have a thing about the phones. Because calls are recorded, I rarely interact via phone in case people are trying to ‘trick’ me into saying something incriminating.

I absolutely despise teamwork and I hate working with others in any capacity. I don’t trust anyone else and I suspect that my colleagues use these opportunities to learn information about me that they can later use against me. This does negatively impact my work and every year in my appraisal I’m pulled up on interpersonal skills and lack of teamwork. This has been a big barrier to me progressing at work.

Being like this is really tiring. I am always exhausted because my mind is in overdrive trying to work out people’s intentions and interpret secret meanings. I started therapy a few months ago after my friends pointed out my paranoia was becoming a huge issue. I became suspicious that my housemates were poisoning my food after I became unwell with a sickness bug. My friends told one of my siblings after I lost a lot of weight, who arranged for me to speak to someone.

At first I was reluctant and hostile during therapy. As someone who hates having to deal with new people and having an intense suspicion that people only ever want to know things about me to use as ammunition, therapy felt horrible and I was incredibly mistrustful. For weeks I sat there and said nothing at all. Over time I have found it started to be helpful although I’d still say my paranoia is bad. I also take anxiety medication which has helped settle some of my fears triggered by paranoia.

One of the biggest ironies is that once I was told I likely had PPD, it developed a paranoia that my therapist was lying about me having it to manipulate me. Once that fear had subsided a little, I then began to tell a small selection of people around me about the PPD. Most people were supportive even if they had no clue what it was. I knew even the people around me thought I was odd so I felt like I owed them an explanation for my behaviour as I often upset people with my manner.

It never actually occurred to me before that my thoughts and behaviour were odd. They made total sense to me. I never saw myself as paranoid or distrustful. I thought assuming the worst in people was what you did to protect yourself and being on your guard all the time was normal. I did notice the negative aspects, such as being isolated and lonely, but I thought they were a reasonable trade-off in exchange of keeping yourself safe.

Generally because of negative reactions in the past I never spoke about my paranoia in case I got labelled as ‘crazy’ or people dismissed what felt like very legitimate fears. When I told one friend I had Paranoid Personality Disorder, her advice was to do a crossword to distract myself. I only wish it was that easy.  When you have PPD the whole world becomes a sinister and threatening place and it’s inescapable.

I’m working on strategies and coping mechanisms now in therapy and I’ve gained a lot of insight, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to lead a paranoia-free life. My thought patterns are so deeply ingrained that I don’t know if that will ever happen. But for my own sanity I have to try.