Paranoid? Me? Who said so?

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The world is fast becoming one filled with paranoid people -- more and more of them every year, says researcher Daniel Freeman of the Institute of Psychiatry at University College London.

Freeman, who’s been studying this subject for years, has developed a virtual reality machine expressly for assessing people’s levels of paranoia (and if you weren’t paranoid before the experiments ...) He says 1 in 4 of the general public has paranoid thoughts on a regular basis, according to his studies. ‘These days, we daren’t let our children play outside. We’re suspicious of strangers. Security cameras are everywhere,’ he remarks in a news release put out by the British charity the Wellcome Trust (Freeman is a Wellcome Trust fellow).

He chalks up the growing trend to a variety of societal factors, including:

-- More and more people are living in cities, where rates of paranoia are known to be higher than they are in rural areas, probably because social bonds are stronger and more stable in rural communities and social isolation is higher in cities.

-- The media over-reports on tragedies, terrorism and crime -- enhancing the perception of these risks in the minds of the public. ‘Over-reporting of dangers fosters a culture of paranoia,’ Freeman says. (He’s picking on us!)

That and much more to be found in his new book, ‘Paranoia: The 21st Century Fear,’ out this week in the UK from Oxford University Press and available in early December in the U.S. (That’ll cheer ‘em up round the holiday tree!) Can’t wait? Try ‘Paranoia: The Psychology of Persecutory Delusions’ (2004), a more scholarly take on the topic that Freeman coauthored.

Intrigued by Freeman’s virtual reality device? Read more about it here. And you can read lots and lots and lots about paranoia right here.

From the vantagepoint of health reporting, do I find this paranoia epidemic hard to believe? Well, we get a lot of calls -- from people explaining that drug companies don’t want to cure cancer, they’re covering up cures -- or that Dr. X has a miracle treatment but the mainstream medical establishment is trying to quash his or her efforts because they are jealous -- or that we deliberately omitted reference to a study or fact in an article not because we are incompetent but because we are in the pay of Big Pharma/the government/wacko environmentalists. And somehow the switchboard operators always pick my phone number to transfer them to.

-- Rosie Mestel