Despite the progress made in mental health awareness, there are certain psychiatric conditions that remain heavily stigmatized: namely, psychosis.
Put simply, psychosis is a lack of touch with reality. Episodes consist of two main groups of symptoms: positive and negative. Positive symptoms are anything added to reality, such as delusions or hallucinations. Negative symptoms are anything taken away from reality, like reduced motivation and cognitive function.
It is difficult to determine the direct cause of psychosis, as it varies per person, but there are many factors that could contribute to someone developing it: drug use, genetics, trauma, physical illnesses or head trauma, mood episodes, stress. People are given different diagnoses depending on length, cause, and type of symptoms.
Out of every 100 people, about three will experience a psychotic episode in their life. Although it is relatively common, it remains foreign to most people, including myself before I was diagnosed. For the purpose of awareness, I made a list of the top three lessons I learned from my experiences with psychosis.
One, reality is relative.
It’s a common misconception that the best way to bring someone with psychosis back to reality is to tell them that what they are experiencing isn’t actually happening. In other words, reality checking. A hallucination will not disappear just because it is “not real,” but telling someone that could make them more disoriented.
Human perception is inherently flawed. Every person processes sensory information differently, and just because someone feels something, does not mean it’s occurring in the physical world. Whether they do or do not fit the situation, however, the emotions are still there, and that is very real.
Each person has their own distinct reality. What is commonly held as “reality” is actually an integration of all these individual realities. Therefore, a person who does not interact with others will not be as connected to the combined reality as a group of people would.
Two, prolonged isolation will drive anyone insane.
Psychosis makes it difficult to blend personal reality with everyone else’s realities; rather than one collective world, it can feel like a million different worlds are constantly colliding. Compounding the problem, people with psychosis are often seen as different, further separating them from reality as a whole.
I sometimes feel as if everything is plastic, and only I am “real.” I don’t truly believe that, as with a delusion, but it’s a distinct loss of connection consistent with negative symptoms. I’m either not a part of the world at all, or grow sick of the emptiness and begin grasping for straws of reality, or both.
If thoughts remain unchecked, as in psychosis, they can overtake a person. In order to find stability, people with psychosis must learn to check their own thought processes with external ones. The same is true for anyone, as life is a constant balancing act of personal and shared reality.
Three, imagination should not be ignored.
While recovering from psychosis, it is very easy to become obsessed with checking one’s thoughts. A rejection of personal reality in favor of the world. A preference for the logic of machines over human emotion. A mask of perceived normalcy.
Some people with psychosis will begin to view religion as a delusion. While it may not have the same factual evidence as science, there will always be phenomena that people cannot explain. Similar to practicing a religion, a patient and clinician may decide to keep unverifiable beliefs, especially if they improve quality of life.
Psychosis is a complicated condition; it can both render someone unable to speak coherently and provide an endless source of creativity. It is often debilitating, but psychosis is always life-changing, and that can have its positives.
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