Nous/noos/no: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nous
To be paranoid is literally to be next to that faculty which enables the perception of truth. You are outside of it, but related to it.
I am going to offer a bold statement: with the exception of innate or traumatic organic defects in the brain and nervous system, all forms of madness derive from trauma, and those which are seemingly inexplicable derive from developmental or subtle emotional traumas, which divide the person through dissociation.
In my own case, I have very high delta brainwaves throughout my brain. They are everywhere. I researched this and found little, but speculated to the person administering the neurofeedback that that was the neurological evidence of dissociation, and he corroborated that. Delta and theta are apparently what appears when the “mind”–which is scarcely a unity–enters a dreamlike state.
And the thing with the nervous system is that dissociation is a lot like a circuit breaker. Once it is triggered, it must be reset or it stays off permanently. You only have to trigger it once–push something to and past complete overload–and the neurophysiological system is permanently altered. With regard to all subsequent traumas, dissociation becomes a resource. They don’t hurt as bad. That primal terror does not reappear, at least in waking hours, and if the trauma is very early in life, does not appear for many decades.
There are many factors involved in the so-called “Midlife crisis”. Certainly, I think the relentless drumbeat of consumerism and the promise that something better is always on the other side of the fence, plays a role.
But I think too that many people enter dissociated states early in life, and only far into life realize that other feelings exist, that they do in fact have opinions, that some pleasure is in fact possible in life, that they have an innate and unexpressed personality.
I will again offer the no-doubt traumatized David Byrne, and his take on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qCl6KyOy34