Word: paranoias
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Some of Vaillant's most important, and controversial, conclusions about treating an alcoholic came as a surprise even to the author. Traditional psychiatric approaches may be helpful for treating accompanying symptoms, such as despair, paranoia or anxiety, he believes, but they are nearly useless in dealing with the underlying nature of alcoholism itself. In his book, he ruefully describes his own disillusionment with his profession's ability to cope with the disease. "I was working for the most exciting alcohol program in the world," he says. But the results at the clinic were no better than...
...feverish in the living room, his loaded pistol pointed toward imaginary enemies he knew were lurking in the garage. Rita, emaciated like her husband, had her own bogeymen?strangers with X-ray vision outside the draped bedroom window?and she hid from them in the closet. The couple's paranoia was fleetingly sliced away, of course, as soon as they got high: they "free-based," breathing a distilled cocaine vapor, Phil alone all night with his glass water pipe and thimble of coke, Rita in another room with hers. In the mornings, Phil and Rita got back together, down...
Sometimes it is purely psychological wounds that drive cocaholics to therapy. But diehard users can be prone to high-pitched anxiety, irrational fears, paranoia and even, reports Harvard's Grinspoon, "out-and-out cocaine psychosis:" Violence is not rare. When Nicky's wife finally smashed his free-basing pipe, he threw furniture and chased her from their suburban house. "I went ape," he says. Mike, the son of a well-to-do South Carolina lawyer, is a patient turned counselor at Charleston's Fenwick Hall drug-treatmeat center. He carried a gun during his cocaine madness...
...democracy to this green and peasant land. That was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. I felt like telling His Belligerence that what this country needs is a good five-cent czar. My tentmate, Major Frank Burns, is even more amusing, if you get your laughs from psychotic paranoia complicated by a spine-wide streak of yellow. He thinks we're here to save Korea from the Koreans, and that when the war is over Seoul will be colonized by the Fort Wayne Kiwanis Club. I couldn't help breaking into a chorus of the Ethel Merman...
...sympathize with the Palestinian cause are fired, schools are closed when students voice their discontent and the homes of Arabs believed to be friendly toward the PLO are torn to the ground. Many Jews recognize these injustices. So Israeli society is becoming divided between those whose anti-Arab paranoia demands rule with an iron fist and those who fear morality is being compromised...