Everything I’ve found to read on the topic so far says that while psychosis can cause anxiety (duh), that anxiety cannot cause psychosis.
But in my experiences, stressful situations (at least stressful for me) absolutely seem to send me into some kind of episode. It’s like it snowballs, and my anxiety and/or depression keep escalating, and then eventually I start experiencing things like the entities talking to me, or people’s faces changing, and so on, and also get sucked into my own head with ideas like I’m a demon or something.
Some things that tend to make me worse are:
Trying to work in an environment where I constantly have to talk/respond to people
Being around family members that stress me the hell out
Being isolated for even just several days at a time
Not being able to sleep and being up all night by myself
Being in unfamiliar/crowded places for prolonged periods of time
Having to interact with medical or psych staff
The weird lighting in most stores
Those are some common stress factors for me, and when my stress level over time builds up, I start to become unhinged.
PLUS most everything I read about psychosis insists that a psychotic person will not know or even suspect that they are becoming psychotic. Well I almost always go through a phase where I know that I am starting to experience some messed up ■■■■, and I can still reason with myself that X, Y and Z are not real, even if they seem real.
So is there just a ton of misinformation out there? Or could it be possible maybe that I have something like OCD that is so severe that it’s mimicking psychosis? Just very confusing.
What are your experiences with any relationship between anxiety and psychosis?
And yeah I saw that. I abandoned my debate with you about the child medication thing because I realized we had likely both been recently triggered by that same piece of garbage troll, and I didn’t want to accidentally take it out on a cool ppl like yourself over something not worth it. Some people.
Yeah, you were actually right that they should investigate, I just meant by my post that I wish my mom had the thought to put me on medication earlier on, she didn’t and I suffered greatly.
Thanks for the link. And yeah I understand. Your mentioning of that incident just reminded me, though, that I got a little snippy with you in that thread, and what I actually mean is that I’m sorry for that. I was riled up about something else and regretted my snippy-ness. Your comment above in this thread reminded me of it, so I wanted to make sure to explain and apologize while it’s in my thoughts.
One of my colleagues from uni called me a loner after a lecture when I was sitting in a front row away from others. When I explained to her that I don’t feel comfortable around too many people she said she has the same: too much info to process causes anxiety in her. Reading faces of other people, reactions, just feels overloading. I was thinking about that theory and came to conclusion that maybe too much/too little sensory input causes our brain to go crazy. Maybe our neurological sensitivity is different than “normal” people’s… sensory deprivation is proved to be responsible for hallucinations and other distresses maybe our level of accepting sensory deprivation is lower… on the other hand when there are too many signals coming to our brain it also causes distress because the tolerance level for sensory input is lower… it’s like an optimum range of incoming signals is smaller than for the healthy brains…I don’t know… I do definitely noticed the same as you guys…
I saw a piece about some kind of experiment they did on the brains of mice that were isolated from others, and mice that had a healthy interaction with others. They said the brains of the mice with the healthy interaction had many more neural connections than the isolated mice. I think that experiment could apply to humans. I’ve found that the more isolated I get the less able I am to solve problems and process information. I also get eccentric when I spend too much time alone. However - I am going to almost contradict myself here, but isolated humans with fewer neural connections might have a greater tendency towards creativity than humans with healthy interaction. They might have fewer neural connections, but the connections they do have are more valuable than the connections interactive people have. Haven’t you noticed how creative people are often eccentric and have trouble handling some of the ordinary problems and ordinary business of life? I don’t know. Just idle speculation on my part, I guess. If you want to think outside the box you need to be outside the box, or at least near its edge.
Heh sorry I haven’t finished… it is an interesting experiment. But I think it’s quite difficult to say that the same happens with humans. We have much bigger and more complicated brain. Social interactions maybe are very importanr in mice survival so it takes quite a big part of a brain. Is it the same with humans? We are social animals but I believe we can outgrow evolutionary predispositions. Look at the WWII and the concentrating camps. The acts altruism for strangers totally was against evolutionary survival rules… maybe it is the same with the creative people. Maybe their social connections are not very developed but other parts of the brain very much so, more than the “regular bread eaters”… of course these are just mine dyvagations, I don’t know myself… but nerology, and neuropsychology are amazing sciences… would like to know more…
Well that would make sense to me, given that without normal community support for survival, even way back when we were nomadic tribes wandering around together, there would need to be compensation if a lone human was going to make it. Creativity would definitely help. I’ve read some stuff on how various disorders might have been beneficial at some point in very ancient time, such as the theory of mania being a mechanism that could have helped our ancestors survive in extreme circumstances, but is now just a major hindrance.
I imagine there is a school of thought that holds that every behavior, even altruism, has some evolutionary advantage. Maybe altruism gives our relatives some kind of advantage in the competition for mates. There is also the risk/reward consideration with every behavior. Psychopathy might give a person some advantages in sexual competition, as long as he doesn’t get carried away and/or get caught. We could go on like this for months, and still not have this question resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.
I get what you mean. Animal abuse and agressive people storys really trigger me and make me feel sick. They make me worry about the state of the world and I then begin to feel like others are against me. I feel sick when I hear about it.but it’s like i cannot control it.
We’re cool!