When I first went psychotic I had an episode where I went through about a twenty-thirty minute episode where my body went through all kind of postures and patterning and involuntary movements with arms flapping and various other movements accompanied by involuntary sounds and vocallizations like animal noises and chants and so on. It was a very odd experience as if I were an autistic person going through re-patterning exercises on my own without aid.
I told this to my p-doc and my psychologist at the time, and they basically said oh really that’s interesting and nothing more.
Has anyone else experienced anything like this? Is there a technical name for this?
This was before I went on AP medication, so it couldn’t be Tardive Dyskinesia.
Yes, i had one thing having to do with that.
My hand began to do things on it’s own. It’s almost like my mind is being screwed with by someone, im sure it’s nothing.
I had involuntary movements but I had an underlying delusion that an entity was controlling my movements
It’s not TD. I’ve had them BIG TIME when I crashed after months on three different bipolar runs. Hands and arms all contorted. Face, too. (Lookin’ like that poor physicist in his wheelchair, only marching around the floor of the acute unit… again.) I also get them during panic attacks sometimes, tho rarely anymore. (TG for Seroquel quetiapine; nothing else got the job done.) Psychotherapy demonstrated it was tied to trying to escape from PTSD memories, emotions and physical symptoms.
These would be known as delusions of alien control, where alien is not necessarily to be read as extraterrestial but just some other agent. It is quite similar to the delusion of thought insertion, but it is its bodily counterpart. Both essentially involve a loss of a sense of agency over your bodily movements or your thoughts respectively. While models have been proposed to explain this loss, it is less clear why sometimes a positive alien agency is attributed to these movements or thoughts.
Yes, i’ve had it twice, it was because of the medication though - a severe dystonic reaction they said
my eyes were rolling, my tongue was rolling and i was seizing over to one side… I was completely psychotic and thought it had something to do with my boyfriend at the time’s communication with me!
I was under home treatment and was being watched taking dissolvable tablets… I had no idea it was the meds, but no wonder i was less than compliant at the time
oh yeah and i also get tics like tourettes but way below significant for a diagnosis, and i’m an Aspie, so i flap my arms sometimes or clap etc