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STOP: Successful Treatment of Paranoia

An app for people struggling with paranoia: turning the bad thoughts good.

Problem

One third of us suffer with distressing paranoid thoughts that reduce our ability to enjoy life. For around 2% this becomes a mental health issue needing psychiatric hospital treatment. Paranoid thoughts often persist even after a person has received supposedly effective psychological therapy (which is expensive and hard to find) or medication (which has unpleasant side effects). But research into paranoid thinking suggests there is a relatively simple way to turn the bad thoughts into good thoughts, just by using the weekly ‘thinking practice’ exercises in our app.

Solution

The way the exercises work has been carefully developed from basic research and the content of the exercises uses libraries of highly specific real-life examples relevant to paranoid thinking that have been collated over decades. Users of the app learn how to think differently about things that typically trigger paranoia and how to apply this way of thinking across all areas of life. And like any other skill, enough practice leads to learning a long-lasting change in thought processes, meaning fewer paranoid thoughts and less distressing paranoia.

Team

Website and social media

UN Sustainable Development Goals