Hi,
so I went ot university for philosophy and always studied read and thought alot etc but cant read and think right now as of the recent psychosis / “episode”. Any advice on tipds on recovery and reclaiming cognition and thinkin ability? Is this loss permanent or am i impaired?
many thanks,
RD
Takes time man. You gotta work at it. I’m finally getting back into a normal frame of mind. Took me two years.
Something is definitely lost for me, but I still have a lot left!
Jayster
The cognition problems you are experiencing are called the “negative symptoms” of schizophrenia. Certain meds treat this better than others. You may want to try brain training, which uses computer based mental exercises to improve cognition. Also, you could possibly improve to some degree from brainwave entrainment. I made some here if interested: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLN8Ux2-8hO-30ktIJlXqHw/videos
Cool! Feels like on an aliens rave party
when I was having a lot of breaks… my ability to read and understand and think was really impaired. It was hard to focus and hard to talk in a straight line. I used to jump topic all the time… because I would forget what I was saying… as I was saying it.
But as the stability came back… (yes… with meds…for me) I think my brain started to heal. I’m not where I was when I was younger… but I’m better then I was when I just got out of hospital.
Memory games… and flash cards… luminosity… stuff like that has helped me as well.
Of course when I’m tired my brain is mush… so I just don’t push it at that time.
Be kind to yourself… work at it little by little… and I have a feeling you’ll get some of it back.
Good luck.
Make sure you sleep enough. For me it was not so much the psychosis itself causing the impairment but the secondary symptom of lack of sleep. As soon as I got a sleeping pill and had a few good nights in a row my concentration was much better. If sleep is not a problem for you then it may also just take some time to recover from psychosis. At any case don’t stop trying to read etc. don’t wait for ‘it’ to come back before you try. They compare the brain to a muscle in this sense that it takes excercise to keep it in shape.
I started out reading self-help books in the 70’s that were really written at a high school reading level. As I continued to read anything I was interested in my concentration and retention slowly came back.
By the 80’s I could read The Great Books series and had no trouble reading philosophers like Epicurus, Epictetus, Locke or Hume or Nietzsche or Montaigne, or like Watts and Suzuki and Confucius.
It definitely is a little like exercise training – you slowly improve and can do more and more and do it more easily.
Eventually it all came back and I now read such “difficult” authors as Marcel Proust and Henry James and relish them.