Well, your first wrong assumption might be that I am currently experiencing symptoms of the syndrome. I think people imagine that nobody ever recovers, but this is simply not true. I feel like people like to pretend like things such as were depicted in “A Beautiful Mind” weren’t actually a thing, or like it’s some kind of weird exception that can be separated from "that one guy on the street. " Remember John Nash was doing just fine until he died of old age a few years ago?
One other thing I like to add, that I see people forget to add sometimes when they talk about having mental health issues, they act like what they experience is what everyone experiences, and everyone else seems to play along, like “oh, now I know what things were like for this one guy, so now I know what things were like for everyone who had that happen.” Also nowhere near true. For instance, the DSM defines schizophrenia as having a certain number of symptoms in a list, and the set of symptoms can be completely non-overlapping between two people with the same diagnoses, yeah there’s problems.
But I did hear voices, and I had some pretty extreme delusions. I am not having the voices right now, and let me tell you, not being entirely sure if you’re having delusions or not because you might be delusional is about as weird as it sounds for me too. It’s one thing to talk about that idea abstractly but when you experience for yourself not being able to trust your own mind at times…
But back to what I was saying. Do not take my experience as being the experience of everyone. It isn’t. I will go on and tell you what it was like for me anyway because it was certainly an interesting experience, for me. Here’s the best way I’ve found to describe it, and I think the analogy works well on a number of levels (but for some reason when I tell people the analogy they seem to just get real quiet, I don’t get it, maybe it’s hard for people to think of something like psychosis as relatable, they want to push it as something that could never happen to them.)
But I’m going to go through the analogy again anyway because it’s accurate, for me. And it is relatable, it happens to everyone. Every night. When you dream. I compare psychosis to waking dreaming. Think about it. When you’re asleep, you do things, you say things, you think things, and when you wake up you’re like “that made no sense, why did I say those things, why did I think them, why did I do them” but, and the analogy continues, when you were asleep you did not know you were being illogical, and there was in fact some kind of weird dream logic that made sense when you were in that state, am I right? Or perhaps people get quiet at this point because they don’t want to imagine what it would be like to be dreaming when there’s real world awake consequences. I do not blame them for thinking that.
I also met a nurse who so far as I know had never had what one psychologist nicely called “strained reasoning” like me, but nonetheless said something that clicked with my experience. He said, “when you are in psychosis, it’s like everything is magically alive” good description. I sometimes think that it’s related with your mind over-looking for patterns. For instance. Going back to the “people experience it differently thing.” People apparently hear voices coming from different kinds of sources. First of all let me say, hearing voices is different from your own thoughts. I’ve heard about people having their voices come from inside their heads but it sounds like a different person, I actually don’t have personal experience with that kind, so I’m not sure how that works. But mine literally came through my ears like any other sound. In fact, and I’ve heard some others have had this experience which was interesting to learn, I always heard them coming from a real life source around me, like an air conditioner humming, or a TV in the other room I couldn’t make out, or just the traffic. Again it’s like my brain was over-looking for patterns, and so found words in white noise. And also everything I saw or everything people said or did around me had some kind of special significance, everything was a symbol for something else.
The video “Animatrix Beyond” is a short anime that resonates a bit with what it was like for things to be magically alive.
Did you know I actually relate quite a bit with the Gnarls Barkley song Crazy? I almost wonder if he actually experienced something because it all resonates so well with my actual experiences.
I was diagnosed around 19 years old, which is a pretty typical age for it to show up. I have always had an intense interest in science, and I was able to complete a degree in genetics at UW Madison with a GPA of 3.41 despite troubles I had during some of that time.
By the way, some people have one episode and recover. Some have a few and recover. Some don’t recover. I had quite a few episodes, and they were pretty intense. I was hospitalized multiple times (i didn’t enjoy that…) My most recent episode was 8 years ago now, but I still worry. Once I was doing well for 4 years but slipped back. (I’m 34 now.)
One last thing to consider, the people having the most symptoms are the most visible. The guy yelling on the street is the one you see. You don’t see him a few years later when he’s better and shaking his head at what went on back then. You’re least likely to see the guy who had only had one episode. You don’t see the one who didn’t get as bad as yelling on the street (ok i may have actually been about that bad and it happened more than once…) well and people in the mental health system kind of actually have the worst bias because they see people specifically when they are at their worst, and not when they are doing well and outside the system.
I’d just like to add also to remember… there was a time, 19 years, when I was just a “normal” person like everyone else and nobody including me had any clue any of this was going to happen, to me.
Ok that was a lot to write
one other thing to keep in mind, i usually don’t tell people any of this. most people i meet have no idea what ive been through. keep in mind that could be true of anyone you run into. i’m not even really sure why i’m sharing here right now, it seems like a risk
