How long did it take you to recover fromnpsychosis and be happy

how long did it take after psychosis for you to feel better and happy

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Years. But I took the needlessly long route. I didn’t do any of the stuff below for a long time because I didn’t know to do it.

Piles of research show that sz pts tend to get ā€œbetterā€ when they…

  1. Get a copy of this book and read it and have their families read it, as well.
    http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Schizophrenia-6th-Edition-Family/dp/0062268856

  2. Get properly diagnosed by a board-certified psychopharmacologist who specializes in the psychotic disorders. One can find them at…
    http://doctor.webmd.com/find-a-doctor/specialty/psychiatry and https://psychiatrists.psychologytoday.com/rms/

  3. Work with that ā€œpsychiatristā€ (or ā€œp-docā€) to develop a medication formula that stabilizes their symptoms sufficiently so that they can tackle the psychotherapy that will disentangle their thinking.

  4. The best of the psychotherapies for that currently include…
    DBT – http://behavioraltech.org/resources/whatisdbt.cfm
    MBSR – Welcome to the Mindful Living Blog
    MBCT - Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy: theory and practice - PubMed
    ACT – ACT | Association for Contextual Behavioral Science
    10 StEP – Pair A Docks: The 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing

  5. the even newer somatic psychotherapies like…
    MBBT – An Introduction to Mind-Body Bridging & the I-System – New Harbinger Publications, Inc
    SEPT – Somatic experiencing - Wikipedia
    SMPT – Sensorimotor psychotherapy - Wikipedia

  6. or standard CBTs, like…
    REBT – Rational emotive behavior therapy - Wikipedia
    Schematherapy – Schema therapy - Wikipedia
    Learned Optimism – Learned optimism - Wikipedia
    Standard CBT – http://www.beckinstitute.org/what-is-cognitive-behavioral-therapy/About-CBT/252/

  7. If you/she/he needs a professional intervention to get through treatment resistance, tell me where you live, and I will get back to you with leads to those services.

  8. Look into the RAISE Project at Google.

not exactly the answer i was looking for but thanks for sharing

You can do it a lot faster than I did if you dig in now.

It took me about a year to go from psychosis not otherwise specified to literally A-ok, according to my transcript. It was one third the meds, one third the therapy, and one third me.

Know that it can be done quickly. It’s daunting, not impossible. I once thought ā€œyeah right, like I will ever be worth a damnā€. Now I think a bit more highly of myself…

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Two and half years after being diagnosed I got out of the hospital and moved into a nice Residential Treatment House. The house was a beautiful two-story place in an upscale neighborhood in an affluent town near Stanford University.

Thinking back, it was like someone flipped a switch and I changed from a psychotic mental patient shuffling his way around the locked ward, into a functioning, participating client of a large agency. Their philosophy was that mentally ill people need structure so this home was heavily structured on a day to day basis. We all ate meals at the same time together, we had morning and evening chores, we took turns cooking and shopping, we had regular groups, we had regular outings to neat places, etc.

Anyway to answer your question, I wasn’t ecstatically happy but after several months at this home I was a little happy. I was certainly not psychotic and miserable anymore

And my little happiness lasted for a few years until I got addicted to crack and had a relapse and I had to be hospitalized several times more. So I was back in the loop again of hospitals, and all that. But I got clean in 1990 and I got a job and moved into a nice board & care and I and went back to school. Those were some good years.

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yeah i know its been three months since my second psychosis and now im psychosis free but im a lot more miserable than the first time around. i just hope it wasnt my recent psychosis that made me feel better the first time around

I think it’s more a matter of being happy and then recovering.

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Live your life, accept who you are, do what you need to, what you want to, and one day, before you even know it, you’ll be better.

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how long did it take you to be happy?

I don’t know, not there yet.

I’m a little confused. What do you mean by your first psychosis making you feel better?

I tend to think it’s funny when I become symptomatic. Is that what you mean?

i meant after my first psychosis it took me a couple months to start feeling better but idk if it was my second psychosis coming on that made me feel better

Oh. Are you schizoaffective or schizophrenic?

I’ll let you know when the happy part comes…but usually for me anxiety/paranoia episodes tend to last about 24.48 hours then I bounce back to my ā€œnormal-selfā€ which isn’t 100% normal. but happy is very elusive for me, and if I do find it it’s often short lived.

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Schizoaffective It’s been tough especially now that I’m in a family party and I see how everybody can drink alcohol and not have to worry about psychosis

for me… the psychosis was hard to recover from… but not as hard as the negative symptoms.

Also… for me… happy is over rated… I had to relearn happy… it is a bit ethereal… happiness.

I first had to learn contentment.

content was easier to grasp. After I found myself content with my life… then I could work up to happiness.

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You might want to be careful about feeling elevated (good) because that could be followed closely by psychosis. You need to talk to your doc about this. What meds are you on and what doses?

I was in university when I turned psychotic for the first time. I quit for half a year to ā€˜recover’ from it. Looking back at it this may not have been the best decision, for me. I was sitting around the house not doing much, had a lousy part-time job in which I saw no future and was slipping into depression. Now that may have happened either way, but my doctor and I think this depression had a lot to do with these changes in activity in my life. It wasn’t really until returning to university for a teaching job that I started feeling better. For me it seems that doing preceeds feeling/thinking. That is to say that I need to stay occupied to feel good. And not to wait until I feel good before I occupy myself.

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I think it is quite an unusual situation one is in, when having taken a ā€˜break from life’ while recovering from psychosis. Obviously, you are sorting out what has happened, finding your feet again, and letting the transition from delusion to common sense sink in. But once you succeeded in that, more or less, there is still an unsual situation when it comes to routines and activities that get you back into the ā€˜flow of life’, so to speak.

In my case, it was at least. I was in a situation where I did not do much, and most importantly, I think now, not much was expected from me either. I think this is crucial when it comes to getting things going again. My doctor pointed this out to me. In ordinary lives, not many people rely solely on themselves and their motivation to get things going. People are connected by all sorts of relations that put demands and expectations on them. This makes for people carrying out all sorts of occupations not so much because they feel so terribly motivated to do so, but simply because they have to. This was different for me in this recovery period. I did not have to do much, after all, I was recovering. But then getting things going again becomes a matter solely of being motivated to do so. And this is a trap, I believe. Like I said, for me doing preceeds feeling and thinking. Motivation will not show up around the corner one day if you wait long enough for it. In my experience, it comes only after engaging oneself with some activity.

I owe much to others for expecting things from me again, when I did not do so myself, for having faith in me, when I did not have so myself. I did not really get myself out of the passivity of this recovery period, others helped me to do so. But one has to have a little faith in those people’s judgments and opinions about what you can and cannot do. It is okay to rely on others, we may need to be reminded of.

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