This essay is for education purposes only. I am not a doctor and the information provided is based upon my own research over a period of five years.
Just as there are many causes of psychosis, there are many ways to resolve it. The following is a list of steps that should be taken to narrow down and eliminate different causes and establish baseline for recovery.
Have hope. Psychosis can be resolved and has been for many people even when a prognosis to the contrary was initially given.
The tendency for psychotics is to isolate, perhaps because of their fears, behavior or the things they say to people that has caused negative reactions. But isolation can compound problems for many. Human beings are social animals and we need camaraderie and assistance in life, it is important to find and be open to relationships of all sorts, the closer the better. Find someone to help in the process.
QUIT any and all illicit or illegal drugs in as safe a manner as possible. You can do this yourself or with help; there is really no reason that you canât stop using a substance, other than your desire to use them and the habits formed around the drugs and the drug itself. It requires you to take responsibility for your mental health, either you want to continue to be psychotic or you have decided to stop feeding the psychosis with chemicals. I recommend exchanging the delusion that drugs are good for you with the idea that a naturally healthy lifestyle is good for you.
The next step is see a otrhomolecuar doctor (preferably), nutritionist or your primary doctor and get some tests done that rule out nutritional deficits, poisoning and intoxications, hormonal disturbances, infections and parasites, cancer, and lesions and any real physical cause. You may get the bum rush to a psychiatrist at this stage by your primary care physician, if that is the case you and your care giver should go to another doctor and ask for these tests to be done. It may cost you some money but it is well worth the money to rule things out. Resolving physical causes holds the promise of resolving your psych crisis.
If you got tested and nothing out of the ordinary was found and you either quit or get help to quit drugs, The next step is to see a doctor of psychology. Psychologists that have a âHumanistic,â âExistential,â and âTrans-personalâ orientation to their practice â are the best. A marriage or family consoler will not be much help to a psychotic. Group therapy is an alternative if you are not able to pay for individual therapy or your health plan limits the number of visits. It can take a long time to resolve the psychosis caused by psychological traumas or short, at this point it really depends on the type of help you get and the amount of effort you put into it. Below in the note are some very effective programs and types of help if they are available in your area you should pursue.
Some psychologists will refer you to a psychiatrist. Many psychiatrists are of the âmedical modelâ variety and will put you on drugs. Some psychiatrists actually practice therapy and are of the âRecovery Modelâ and may offer therapy or different alternatives. If you choose to go to or end up with the âmedical modelâ variety of psychiatrist and get on drugs, I recommend you take as little as is necessary to alleviate the worst of symptoms and make every attempt with other therapies at the same time. Often medication can be an impediment to resolving the cause of the psychosis. Unfortunately, anti-psychotic drugs are the only thing offered in the âmedical modelâ and sometimes getting out of a drug filled desert, requires going geographically somewhere else. When a persons life is at jeopardy, drugs are good way to stop a crisis and a voluntary brief stay at a psych-ward can actually be beneficial.
There are several alternative models for recovery for anyone that experiences psychosis. I will list SOME of these at the end of the article. I am not a magical thinker and the links I will provide are not of that variety. They have solid research behind them and they work for many people.
RESEARCH psychosis and the issues that are brought up during a psychotic event, as much as possible. Become an active participant in the resolution of your psychosis. Remember there is always hope. Do not let anyone tell you that you will be âSickâ for life or that you need to take pills for the rest of your life, there is no way they know that and many people have resolved their psychosis, why not you? The has been a revival in research and there are all sort of programs and therapies offered in the western world for dealing with psychosis, there is new hope.
I find that most of then not, what gets in the way of a resolution of psychosis are stigma, money, and geographical location. Any obstacle can be surmounted if a person has the will and strong desire to resolve their psychosis. A holistic approach to resolution is the best, meaning all facets of your being addressed in treatment: biological, mental, and spiritual.
The following are further resources for true recovery, informational sites, pages for programs, and subject matters that are vital to any serious person that wants to resolve their psychosis.
Rethinking Madness (the website for the book): Towards a paradigm shift in our understanding and treatment of psychosis. The writer is a truly recovered psychotic and doctor of Psychology: http://www.rethinkingmadness.com/
Soteria. In the seventies and early eighties, the former director of the National Institute on Mental Health (NIHM) did and experiment where hospitals and drugs were not used but instead a different model was used where psychotics and semi professionals were housed together in a community with oversight by a psychiatrist and a social worker. The experiment was considered a success despite problems with illegal and illicit drug use by some of the psychotics, the majority experienced comparable out comes and sometimes exceeding recovery rates to those that were medicated. This link is to wikipedia article ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soteria
The Soteria Network is a revival of the Soteria method and has helpful links for projects going on in the US and the UK ~ http://www.soterianetwork.org.uk/
Hearing Voices Network (InnerVoice). A world wide movement of voice hearers (and other psychotics) that come together to talk through their experience and resolve the problems that arise with Voices and Visions ~ http://www.intervoiceonline.org/
Iâd love to hear your own personal story of how itâs all helped you. Tell me how has your life has changed so much. What do you do for a living now? Are you married now? Kids? When was your last symptoms? How are your interpersonal relationships now? Please I want to hear it all.
You get back those things you really value dreamscape but first you have to know what you really value, the only thing missing from my life right now is job, but I have resumes out, thats easy to solve. I am writing a book about my recovery, it is far to detailed to post here. Nothing is ever perfect but there is an end to the trauma and psychosis.
I am always wary about people who claim âThey knowâ. Your resources for ârecoveryâ are a cobbling together of anti mainstream/antipsychiatry sources.
Psychiatry didnât work for me at all⌠Iâm not anti psychiatry at all but in my case all the meds I were on didnât do â â â â . The professionals advice was bland useless and untailored. They did nothing to find out what I was really going through. I had to rebuild myself and my mind. Pills would have never done that. Psychiatry doesnât work for everyone.
All I see is you still suffer with the negatives. I asked for details and you gave me nothing. If I found âthe answerâ you have no idea how much Iâd rave on about it especially on how my life had changed. More so as someone was asking about it. As thatâs what an emotionally healthy person would do.
Not exactly antipsychiatry (with the exception of madinamerica leans that way) but they are not mainstream either. I am familiar with all those websites except opendialogue, which I shall check outâŚ
Truth is these alternative therapies and practices can work for some. They might not work for everyone, but neither do meds and traditional psychiatry work for everyone.
Mister_Lister has obviously benefited from alternative methods, and so have I. So have a lot of others. People should not just rule this out and call it rubbish because these are proven methods. the realm of the mind and by extension, mental health are a mysterious thing. Not everything can be proved by science, seen under a microscope, or measured in units per deciliter of blood. There are some things the brain/mind does that are still a mystery to us, and as such, treatment will vary and several different approaches reach the same goal which is for people to have a healthy mind, be in control of themselves, and have a successful lifeâŚI donât mean financially successful or any material thing, but just having a life they feel worth living, and seeing the beauty in thatâŚ
I have not âcobbledâ togehter the anti-psychiatry list, I am not anti-psychiatry fire monkey look for my other post. The reason I left this site was to find solutions, not because I was against medication.
I have been living with BP/SZA for a long time - I have tried alternative methods and its gotten me nowhere fast.
The only thing that keeps my moods and psychosis in check are medications - period.
Yeah mood problems sounds like a real battle very different from cognitive psychosis. Some people have the other kind of psychosis. Negative symptoms suck. There isnât really a led for them. Not one that is safe anyways.
Sometimes things work themselves out as well. My psychosis has gotten waaay better in recent years. Not sure whyâŚit ruled my existence for most of my life and now I just feel like I have it under control finally. I understand it. Donno if the progress was chemical or just due to my research and coping skills but I donât really care.
The only issue Iâm having is that the most popular type of therapy out there right now is CBT. I donât really like CBT from what Iâve experienced of it, but Iâm having a lot of trouble finding people who donât practice CBT, much less have any experience with psychotic disorders.
I truly believe some âalternativeâ methods can be very effective on the basis of how mind, brain and world are related to each other. It is without a doubt that psychosis is a problem of the mind: subjectivity is all screwed up and the psychotic inhabits a different world all together - which is no surprise if you see how the mind contributes to the constitution of oneâs world. The brain is of course a powerful lower-level contributing causal mechanism underlying the mind. But the mind is only in part realized by the brain. Other contributing factors are the environment and world one inhabits. (yes there is circular causality here). In turn, the partially socially constituted superstructure that is the mind influences the brain just as much in a top-down fashion as the brain influences the mind in a bottom-up fashion.
From this brief sketch of how mind brain and world are correlated, it should come as no surprise that both bottom-up (meds) and top-down (therapy?) approaches can help and change the mind for the better. Not only meds are bottom-up, nutritional approaches also try to work from the brain/body to influence the mind. A true alternative would be a top-down approach, one that changes a persons world and through this, the persons mind and since it is constrained by these superstructures, eventually also the brain. This would be some sort of very extensive psychosocial therapy. However, I think that if one wants to take seriously such an approach, the therapy needs to be so extensive that really a whole persons world is changed: much too extensive and expensive to have this as a typical treatment plan. So the bottom-up is just cheaper. It can, and often is, accompanied by some minor form of therapy that works from the top down. In principle though, only top-down without meds should be possible, but a two way approach seems most efficient and encompassing.
Have you looked into the Soteria experiment, I have talked about here many times. It is a psycho-social approach. Open Dialogue as used in the Lapland of Finland is also a psychosocial approach.
I often find that for myself and others I have talked with that share the same disorder, find benefit in emersive theraputical environments out side of the hospital. Both of the above approaches do this in different ways.
The Soteria experiment was done in two houses where people with the disorder stayed. No forced medication, free to come and go during the day and night as long as one came back to the home.The environment was centered around the disorder and the people that worked in it were open and recieving and would not shut people down but would discuss issues, beliefs, or what not. It was over seen by a social worker and and a psychiatrist. The out comes for this experiment despite the illegal and illicit drug use by some of the patients (it occured in the late 70s in California) was comprable to medication out comes with in three months. You should read up about it. The US State of Vermont has set up Soteria houses modled (with some refinements) according to the original experiment. It is also being tested in England and Scottland.
The Open Dialog method is basically emersive talk therapy, which is very intensive and sometimes involves the whole family. A psychologist basically allows the patient to dialog about his or her experiences issues with out with out shutting them down and the whole family can be involved. This technique has made schizophrenia extinct for the most part in Western Lapland of Finland and is on its way to becomeing a nationalized form of treatment of schizophrenia and other disorders of psychosis.
These are the psychosocial treatments I have researched for psych induced psychosis which are very promising and I wish they were more wide spread. People simply do not know about them and are not given the option. Of course the only thing I was ever offered when I was ill was medication and cbt therapy (group therapy but I found that absolutely useless).
Iâm pretty sure that the resulting written statistics about itâs success rate were shaded towards the point of view of the people who ran it. Just to play devils advocate as someone who lived there a year: MAYBE, the clients had as successful rate of recovery as people who are on medication. And thatâs a big maybe. But if I had to pick between the side-effects of medications vs the suffering I witnessed there and experienced myself for a year without medication I will pick my meds.