Two ways people stay off meds. Either they have great insight, or they lack insight. I see people knowing they need meds as a positive sign of good insight. I have done 16 years on meds and 9 years off. Both had their negatives in different ways. For me, my schizophrenia kept me off meds, i wasn’t a case of great insight and coping skills.
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I went 6 months without aps in 2015. I was doing quite well, but I ended up getting mania that culminated in paranoia. My doc and I agree the risk for mania is too high, so I’m staying dutiful in taking my Caplyta 
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Insight can be re-inforced, but it literally took me several decades to learn how to do it consistently and powerfully.
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It’s been a long time for me too and i think my insight is alright. It’s not 100 percent. Like for example when i get pursecutory thoughts i can’t tell if they are real or not but i remember mostly that it’s a possibility it’s paranoia or delusion. Even if i think there’s only a 5% chance that it’s paranoia or delusions, that 5% keeps me from taking any extreme actions because of the delusion. That 5% doubt helps me a ton.
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That isn’t necessarily true either it’s a spectrum disorder so some people can probably just get away with more than others when they are off meds.
Being able to put up with symptoms is a function of the level of your symptoms, your tolerance for symptoms and stress as well asinsight and strategies to mitigate them. There are many things that go into holistic management of symptoms and while the medication generally has the largest effect size if you think it ends there you are missing the rest of the picture. Medication has primacy because of the biomedical model and causal social factors are generally harder to change and impossible to quantify. That said there are yet a lot gains that can be made with or without involving medication.
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Lexicall I am not that strong because I’m only educated in computer programming. So I’m not verbally strong but mor logically strong.
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Every one has strength and weakness, most people also tend to over rely on their strengths to compensate in day to day life
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