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Paranoid delusions seem to be a significant occupational hazard at top levels of play.

Any theories on why that is?

Maybe having super-charged pattern-making ability makes for great chess AND great paranoia.

The brain is a pattern recognition engine well known to report many false positives. Most people are aware of that, be it often unconsciously. Chess masters learn to trust their intuition and pattern recognition, even when contrary signals are present, because, for some reason, that works in chess. It doesn't in the real world, where there are much more than 32 (the number of pieces) facts to keep track off.

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