What coping methods do you have?

This is a question to those who still have positive symptoms on medication. Can you give me an example of your symptoms and what coping methods you have?

Ok hearing voices out and about I put my headphones and music on.

seeing things and paranoia I try one of two things. I either play NIN Only in my head, or I count backwards from ten. Works better for paranoia than the visuals.

For delusions, I lie down on my bed and become thoughtful. Somehow, it’s easier for me when I’m lying down.

i think we all have positive symptoms even on medication. my psychiatrist once told me that the goal is to achieve an optimal balance between side-effects and symptoms, which I took to mean that he’d have to medicate me into a coma to get rid of every last symptom. one of my big lingering tweaks is talking to myself. at its fullest flare, my delusions centered around being observed from cameras and recorded and having it transmitted around the world. so, still, if talk to myself, things always get worse. but it’s hard not to sometimes to fill the silence.

if you can’t think of anything specific to your delusions like that … . … and we probably all hallucinate more when we answer, just remember that stress feeds psychosis. and remember too that, when you have a momentary blip but are otherwise well-medicated, there’s probably something going on in your head that upset you, that triggered a stress spike, some memory or thought that you’d prefer to remember a different way or wish you didn’t have. or an emotional reaction you’re not okay with at the thought/rational level. the impression i was left with after years of therapy is that the period of stress that preceded our fractures, each of us, served as a pressure cooker things about ourselves that we weren’t at home with. we couldn’t bring ourselves to accept them and couldn’t find an outlet for them, whether they were unrealized desires that we grew to hate ourselves for having, or feelings of humiliation that we couldn’t bear to integrate with our sense of our own identity, or what have you. what i’m saying is, it comes from within us. it has to, right?

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Because I hear voices . . . I listen to music (especially instrumental music because then I can’t interpret the words into my delusion), read a lot, paint, write, color . . . I find that if I am focused on something the voices don’t tend to bother me . . . recently started meditating and have found that that kind of focusing of the mind really helps, even later when I’m stressed it’s easier to remind myself to breathe and focus . . . I walk a lot . . . I’ve been talking back to the voices and this sometimes stops them or outs them as ridiculous . . . been trying to talk more to myself to use up that brain space . . . I find it’s best for me to be actively engaged in doing something, whether it’s conversation or reading or learning something new . . .

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