A lay term commonly used to describe an overly suspicious person. The technical use of the term refers to persons with paranoid ideation or to a type of schizophrenia or a class of disorders.
Pervasive and long-standing suspiciousness and mistrust of others; hypersensitivity and scanning of the environment for clues that selectively validate prejudices, attitudes, or biases. Stable psychotic features such as delusions and hallucinations are absent.
Describing a mental state characterized by fixed and logically elaborated delusions. There are many causes, including paranoid schizophrenia,; manic-depressive psychosis, organic psychoses such as alcoholism, paraphrenia, and severe emotional stress.
Bearing a resemblance to paranoia, especially a type of schizophrenia primarily characterized by delusions and hallucinations.