When I say I was psychotic I mean that I was symptomatic…delusional and experiencing thought insertion/broadcasting. But the thing is I never behaved in an unusual manner, no one would have known I was experiencing symptoms of psychosis. I guess I never entirely lost touch with reality…I was just experiencing the unreality while still in touch with the reality around me.
I know when my friend Jcal was experiencing psychosis I refused to take him anywhere in public as he would scare people talking loudly about bizarre things and acting like a hyper six year old. I may have acted in similar manners in private I’ll admit…at least when massive amounts of liquor and drugs were involved…sure there were times like that. But in public or around certain company I acted and spoke in a completely sane manner and was always able to.
I guess there’s a point that I may never have been able to reach where you either don’t care or aren’t aware or are so convinced of the reality of things unreal that you end up acting on such things…but I don’t know as I’ve never been there.
Anyone else ever experience psychosis but never lose control or awareness of reality?
This is why I have my mom accompany to every pdoc and therapy meeting, because I’m extremely talented at convincing people that nothing is wrong when in fact everything is wrong. She gives me a chance to express my feelings, and then she tells them how I’ve really been acting. It’s a little irritating, but I know she does it for the best.
Well despite my recent posts, I have always had a part of me that is aware of reality. At my worst when I was 19 nobody could tell anything was wrong with me by the way I acted, spoke or looked. I’ve had a few therapists tell me that if they didn’t know my diagnosis already they would not be able to tell.
The whole description of psychosis I find to be rather vague…it’s most basic definition is a loss of contact with reality. I am also reading that if one hears voices or whatnot but does not believe they are real then this person may not be considered psychotic.
I’m going to ask my new doctor about some of these things next time I meet with him but this isn’t for a little while…like if I was delusional and experiencing what I believed was telepathy was I psychotic? If on the occasion that the police arrived for instance I was able to immediately calm down and act sane and normal…does this mean I was ever even psychotic in the first place?
It’s not what you think that makes you psychotic, it’s what you say out loud that seals the deal.
Can’t ever say I acted psychotic except inside my own house alone…but boy, some of the things I have told that went on in the house have gotten me slammed in the hospital real fast.
I usually acted very normally when I was in a psychosis. I did not give responses to the voices and delusions. But one time I DID act very oddly because I refused to let my husband come into the house. Instead I cried and said “why have you come here to cheat me again?” I said this because my delusion told me my true husband had already died and someone else came to me under a mask of my husband. That was my 2012 relapse. Very crazy and dangerous.
My psychosis is very mild so my voices, although they bothered me, didn’t make me behave any different. I was aware of reality, but at the same time I didn’t know what was real and what was not in my head. I just withdraw into my head and go quiet on the outside when psychotic, unless I fight with the voices. My husband saw me do that sometimes and it scared him.
I usually keep things to myself as well. The only thing people might notice about me that’s different while I’m in an episode would be that I’m way more forgetful and scattered than usual. I keep all the delusions, painful anxiety, hallucinations, voices, etc. inside because I know I’d be judged.
I guess it’s just because we have a less severe form of it. For example I can still function on a very basic level while in an episode (basically I can clean myself, eat, and that’s about it. I can’t really do much else so mostly I’ll lie in bed and sleep all day) but people with more severe psychoses would lose touch with reality completely, and those are the people who end up in the psych wards and whatnot. We’re the lucky ones.