Confronting a Paranoid World

by Carol Campbell, MFT

Anyone paying attention to the world these days might be forgiven for wondering if maybe it's all going to hell in a hand basket. There is no escaping the assault from stories of terrifying and heart-wrenching problems. We have constant reminders of disturbing and intractable situations, from beggars at the intersections of our streets, to wars and natural disasters around the globe. Compassion fatigue sets in. We worry about protecting innocent children from unspeakable images.

People have always found ways to be cruel to other people, but there are more of us now. While we have always made tools to carry out our hurtful intentions against enemies, advances in technology have upped the ante. Now we fear that we need to watch for enemies all around us. The government is spying on us. That backpack could be concealing a bomb. We can't trust our financial institutions to do the right thing. My food might be poisonous. Maybe owning a gun will make me feel safer. To sum it up, we are becoming a paranoid world.

So what can be done? We need to stop thinking of the field of psychology and the practice of psychotherapy as anything other than critically important. Psychology is traditionally overlooked as compared to the fields of study and endeavor that have brought us such things as nuclear weapons and hand-held electronic gadgets and big-box stores pressing us to indulge in excess. Science and math is where it's at, baby – no time for figuring out why people hate each other so much and are in denial of their self-destructive paths. Psychology is supposed to be a squishy field, and therapy is for whiners, right?

Maybe not. If we live in a paranoid world, maybe we need the help of people who know how to think about it, talk about it, and change it. We desperately need psychologists to be in the media, on the stage, in our books, and in front of our classes, helping us deal with our collective denial and irrational fears. Similarly we need psychotherapists to help us face our own personal contributions to the unhealthy emotional world we live in.

Our leaders especially need to receive psychotherapy. Personality disordered congresspersons cannot be allowed to have their paranoid thinking go unchallenged. We need to teach our children to recognize narcissistic behavior, and how a borderline personality disordered person will whip up the chaos in any organization, from a family to a corporation. The Girl Scouts need to have a proficiency badge and the Boy Scouts need to have a merit badge in understanding psychodynamics of human relationships.

Let's take pride in acknowledging personal psychotherapy. Our political system might actually work again if those seeking public office were expected to have first had psychotherapy. Psychoeducation can help us learn about breaking through our collective denial. But let's give psychotherapy the respect it deserves as a key to finding a way out of this paranoid world.

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Carol L. Campbell, MFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist providing psychotherapy and psychoanalysis for individual adults and couples in Palo Alto, California. She has degrees from Brown University and Santa Clara University and has been licensed since 1991. Carol is a graduate of the Palo Alto Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Training Program sponsored at Stanford by the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and was a candidate at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California in San Francisco from 2010-2011. She is also a clinical member of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists and the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology.