Wellness & Fitness

Am I becoming paranoid about my difficult manager?

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My boss has a habit of blankly staring at me whenever I make critical presentations and never utters a word. Am I being paranoid here?
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As a young post graduate student in London in the late seventies, I trained under the watchful eye of the late Prof Michael Shepherd. One of his most famous publications was on the subject of morbid jealousy, which subject we will return to shortly.

Your question has catapulted me back to my younger days when, after arriving in the UK in late September, two events conspired against me.

The first was the fact that days were rapidly getting shorter, so that by early November, we went to work before sunrise, and the sun set long before we were done at work.

As though that was not enough, the temperatures started to go south (literally). What confused me at the time was that even on a sunny Saturday in late October/November, the sun was so weak that one had to either remain indoors or wear thick jackets.

In ward rounds, the professor was exactly like your boss. Whenever anyone of us made what we thought was an excellent presentation of a patient, followed by well reasoned and researched diagnosis, the big man would gently stroke his nose, dunk a biscuit in his tea and proceed to say nothing!

Once in a long while, he might utter something totally inaudible which his long serving social worker would later assure us was his way of saying “well done young man.”

He did not give us any other form of feedback and increasing efforts and seeming excellence on our part did not elicit any form of recognition.

Like you, we became progressively “paranoid”, and kept wondering what we had done wrong. Our senior colleagues who had worked with this professor kept telling us this was his personality and that we had nothing to worry about. That did not lessen the pain and paranoia that we felt at the time.

Does my teacher sound a bit like your boss, then you must take heart in the fact that your “paranoia” is a reactive condition that has resulted from the behaviour of your boss.

Though called paranoia, your reaction is not in any way the same as a paranoid illness, as understood by mental health experts, which is a medical disease. Same word (paranoia) two meanings. One medical and the other one not.

Coming back to my professor and his famous publication, this appeared in the July 1961 issue of what later became The British Journal of Psychiatry. The article is 68 pages long, and describes morbid jealousy as a psychiatric symptom.

Shepherd tells us that even the most celebrated poets and academics have described rather than defined jealousy.

The famous Philosopher Baruch Spinoza famously described jealousy as a “mixture of love and hate.”

Just in case you are wondering where this story is going, let me explain. You fear that you might be paranoid in relation to your boss. I have told you that what you have is not a medical condition which goes by the same name, but a normal reaction to the behaviour of a difficult and strange boss.

This has then led us to the term jealousy (which sometimes leads to paranoia), which also has both lay and technical meanings.

Used in my teacher’s famous paper, the words morbid jealousy is a description of a person, (usually male) whose jealousy and paranoia about his wife has no basis in reality, and I use it to illustrate the fact that you have a basis for the “paranoia” unlike the person with morbid jealousy who is sick in the mind and without any basis in reality for his belief.

The sufferer of this condition will in the typical case accuse his wife of infidelity. He will for example say that he has noted that his wife has become more sad or happier in the last few weeks.

Either state can, to the paranoid mind be an explanation leading to the conclusion of infidelity. In the alternative, the wife might have changed her dressing style, hairstyle or even her cooking (whether real or imagined).

To the person with morbid jealousy, a train of thought is then established, which in some cases leads the man to hire the police or private investigators and to place surveillance cameras in her car, office, and sometimes in the bedroom, just in case she brings men into the house!

No amount of denial will change his false belief, and indeed, the more vigorous the denial, the more the sick mind believes the poor woman is guilty.

In desperation, some women “confess” to things they have not done, hoping they can buy peace, but sadly some have suffered serious injury, some because they deny while others because they confess! This is one of the very few conditions we treat, where we advice women to separate from their husbands at least until treatment is effected.

As you can see, there is nothing for you to worry about your “paranoia” because it is not part of a medical condition as described by my teacher.