I lurked a long time before I felt I could post. I was too paranoid.
I mean to be honest, I think being on this forum isnāt particularly helpful. I can think of many instances where it was a strict negative precisely when I needed support or understanding. This place isnāt always friendly when you are in need of help because you can easily be seen as a danger to the community in those moments and treated as a threat when you need help the most. The rules make sure of that in order to prevent our problems rubbing off on one another, which isnāt even wrong mind you but it puts into question how useful having these interactions is. I personally think that while I enjoy being around here while things are good and some of the information is helpful, I would probably be better served cutting the whole thing off from my life in order to make it easier on me to stay away when things are bad instead of having a habit pulling me here when I am really not welcome and letās make no mistake, any true display of psychosis is more or less unwelcome here unless they very clearly inspire pity and very little else.
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In Australia it says 1in2 (almost) will experience symptoms of mh in their lifetime!
Iām sorry you feel this way, but itās not that a true display of psychosis is not welcome here; itās that the website, in my opinion, is not a crisis line. For example, we have a pinned thread āCrisis Intervention Resourcesā for this very reason.
This website is peer-to-peer support: we are not mental health professionals, so, in my opinion, this website should never be used in lieu of seeking immediate professional help if anyone is in psychosis.
That said, I hope you stick around because you may find this website helpful for general support.
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They forget about us
Many mental health campaigners will only talk about anxiety and depression
Wonāt touch the psychotic illnesses with a barge pole
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I donāt disagree with you, I am just saying that it is hard when you use something for support to then avoid it when you need support the most. The forum has a purpose, and even my presence here does. What I am saying is that when I am psychotic making the conscious choice to separate the appropriate from the inappropriate within a given time and place becomes harder and so does filtering myself. I donāt blame the forum for keeping the discussions clean, lest the place quickly turn into an echochamber in which to dwell on our symptoms, I am saying that when it does happen and you do get moderated when you need help, itās actually a double whammy despite the fact that it is needed by the community to stay healthy. So despite not being an accusation towards the community or the moderation, with whom I agree, it is a personal concern and a valid reason in and of itself for some of us to want to steer clear, which was the topic at hand.
Thanks for the time and kind words.
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Hey, if you have ways of reasoning past hallucinations and delusions that work well for you, Iād like to hear them. Really. I bump along on the lowest dose of APs possible so I can side-step them making my negs worse and giving me cognitive drag. Too many APs and I am unable to hold down a job. I am using every strategy I can that is not meds to help keep my cheese on my cracker. If you have something youāre doing that works better than what Iām doing for managing positives, I want to know about it.
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I donāt know if they are better than your methods, I donāt even know your own methods. As far as positives go I basically donāt have any outside of psychotic episodes as long as Iām physically healthy and not listening to music. As a result I donāt have coping mechanisms. My main process to deal with the positives while psychotic is to work on the pathways that give rise to them while Iām not psychotic, familiarizing myself with the healthy versions of things like āmind-readingā(for example by checking in songs where part of the information for the next sentence and tones gets embedded in the previous ones in order to make the whole thing easier to memorize and flow while singing), I simply identify the source of the delusion or disperception, isolating which information gets misinterpreted and how when I am sane by finding areas that could give rise to the whole issue if compromised, and then simply train myself and/or my subconscious to be more aware of those pathways and accurate in those regards while sane in order to make my positives when they do appear more likely to align with truth. Turning my psychotic delusions closer to zeal and rashness by increasing the magnitude of the grains of truth that drive them. That and I work a lot on my realization and my awareness of it in general in order to spot alterations to it and, hopefully, fix them or at least avoid leaning on them.
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The big thing is that I am constantly busy with something. I find the positive syptoms have more trouble latching onto a moving target, so I keep moving. That also keeps me from getting bogged down by my negatives. I do CBT exercises nearly daily to try and condition myself to treat delusions and hallucinations as such and not take them seriously. I canāt get rid of them, but I can ignore them to a certain extent. The other issue for me is stress management.
More stress = more symptoms = less insight. The inverse is also true so I am very careful to avoid stuff that winds me up (watching the news especially). I do a lot of therapy exercises and use workaround to keep myself sailing smoothly or to descalate myself when I am not. I do a lot of therapy workbooks and I see a therapist via Zoom once a month.
Does that help?
Maybe not everyone with sciz is living comfortably in their homes with access to the internet. 
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I guess the aliens beamed up everyone else. Jk 
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