Querulant
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A querulant (from the Latin querulus - "complaining") is a person who obsessively feels wronged, particularly about minor causes of action. In particular the term is used for those who repeatedly petition authorities or pursue legal actions based on manifestly unfounded grounds. These applications include in particular complaints about petty offenses.
Querulant behavior is to be distinguished from either the obsessive pursuit of justice regarding major injustices, or the proportionate, reasonable, pursuit of justice regarding minor grievances. According to Mullen and Lester, the life of the querulant individual becomes consumed by their personal pursuit of justice in relation to minor grievances.
In psychiatry, the terms querulous paranoia (Kraepelin, 1904) and litigious paranoia have been used to describe a paranoid condition which manifested itself in querulant behavior. The terms had until recently largely disappeared from the psychiatric literature, largely because they fell out of fashion after being misused to stigmatise the behavior of people seeking the restitution of valid grievances. In the DSM-IV-TR, "querulous paranoia" is a subtype of the persecutory type of delusional disorder. It also appears in ICD-10 using its Latin name under "Other persistent delusional disorders ".
Nevertheless, according to Lester et. al. querulous behavior remains common, as shown in petitions to the courts and complaints organizations. They state that "persistent complainants’ pursuit of vindication and retribution fits badly with complaints systems established to deliver reparation and compensation [and that] [t]hese complainants damaged the financial and social fabric of their own lives and frightened those dealing with their claims."
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