People with schizophrenia may experience delusions which may give rise
to fears that others are plotting against them. FILE PHOTO | NMG
Qn. I have two colleagues at my workplace who don’t get
along whatsoever although none of them is able to pin-point the cause of
this. It is affecting work flow and we desperately need a way of
bringing this to a stop.
bringing this to a stop.
Some months ago, we saw a
35-year-old man who was clearly depressed, and who blamed his workplace
for all his many problems. That was the presenting problem, and his
manager sent him to us because he was convinced that nobody in the
workplace could be causing the kind of problems he was alleging.
He
had worked for the bank for seven years. He was in charge of a large
team that was responsible for risk evaluation in the credit department.
His credentials were excellent. A first class degree in Economics and
Finance was complemented by qualification as a Certified Public
Accountant and an MBA from a first rate university.
In the most recent evaluation at work, he was a top performer
who achieved and often exceeded his targets. The only (seemingly slight)
blot on his otherwise brilliant career, was the fact that one or two of
his managers saw him as “a bit of a loner” and that he “seemed to lack
people skills”. None of these comments raised an eyebrow and their
relevance would only become important later.
During the
evaluation of what was, on the face of it, a simple case of depression,
a darker past begun to make itself evident. The young man, as the
managers had already noted, was a bit of a loner who lacked people
skills. He had always been secretive and kept all his things to himself.
He had insisted on making sure that he was able to see everything that
was happening in the office. He is the only person who worked with the
door to his office locked. He did not want people to hear what he was
saying to customers. He often worked late at the office for fear that
others might somehow interfere with his thinking process (he could not
explain how this could happen but he still believed it).
He
did not attend office functions. He said that those who attended them
were lazy, noisy and were mostly promiscuous as the men kept looking at
the women “badly” and the women were all flirts! Asked by a young intern
why the girls were in his view flirts, he simply retorted: “Can’t you
see how they walk around?”. Told that all girls seemed to walk the same,
he dismissed the intern as without experience of “these things”. The
intern posted on social media: “Working at a place with strange boss who
does not like girls.”
He was single, and had not been known to have ever kept a girlfriend for more than a few weeks.
Once,
and only once when he had mistaken a glass of punch with orange juice
had he become drunk and “confessed” to one of the cleaners that all
women lived to exploit men. He explained that he could never trust a
woman because as soon as he let his guard down, she would get all his
passwords and she would take all his money! That, he explained as he
went into his first ever (and last) alcoholic slumber was the nature of
women. They had not changed from the days of Adam and Eve.
It was after this event that the staff (mostly fellow managers)
took more interest in the man. He became increasingly suspicious. He
claimed the accidental consumption of the punch filled alcoholic
beverage was a plot to finish him at work.
At first, he
blamed his boss. Later he changed the story to say the boss had been
sent by the police who thought he had stolen money from a government
project.
The more the boss denied ever having contacted
the police on this or any other matter concerning him, the more the man
felt alienated by the company and all its “conspirators”.
When
we saw him, it was the CIA who were investigating his bank accounts
because of possible links to criminal gangs in South America! None of
his fears made any sense to his colleagues.
To the doctors, this was a 35-year-old man slowly developing Paranoid Schizophrenia. All the symptoms pointed to this diagnosis.
He
was admitted to a private clinic (for his own safety – so he believed)
and a few weeks into his treatment emerged a changed and happy man, free
of suspicion. He was seen weeks later with a girl who he said he liked!
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