If you wonder why many people don’t understand most of us it’s the separation of realities. If you see a historical account. or a news story of extreme suffering you can sort of imagine it. But if you are sitting in a room with a comfortable temperature eating plenty of food, and feel relatively safe you really don’t know how they felt or feel. Sad to say no one is really in our head as far as I can tell now. When I take my meds properly I never hear someone talk about what I’m thinking like I thought I did when I was very ill. One time when another person with schizophrenia told me I was in her head I knew that wasn’t true because I never heard her voice in my head. So if you are not in someone else’s shoes you can’t relate. In a way since each experience is unique we don’t completely understand what one another’s psychosis amounts too either. All other people know who are not having psychosis is that we are behaving bizarrely on the outside. Every time I’ve been in a very cold and snowy situation I always had a warm place to retreat to when I became chilled. I have never been a soldier in the barracks having to face the cold for weeks and months with just an occasional campfire to keep me warm or a motorist trapped in the snow for days. And very few people know what it’s like to be drugged all the time with the alternative of having 24/7 hour noise in your head that keeps you from sleeping for months either. So when someone doesn’t understand what you are really going through take it with a grain of salt. And since most pdocs are not psychotic it’s not hard to see how they wouldn’t relate either and that schizophrenia remains a mysterious illness.
4 Likes
This is a good post.