I.

Friends and family, probably teachers in high school too, expected me to go to university and get a four-year undergraduate degree fairly smoothly.

(Unfortunately, that wasn’t how things panned out.)

It was uncannily easy to convince my family of lies about how I was doing at university. I remember one day in the winter holidays – December – in a parking lot, my Mom asked me what my grades in school were. I had been dreading any questioning of how my time at university went – so much so that I hadn’t even thought about what I would say if questioned; subconsciously, I avoided thinking about any potential confrontation. My Mom asked me what my grades in school were, and I responded quietly with, “All As, except one A-”.

...which was a lie that came out of nowhere.

The truth was that in that entire semester, I didn’t look over notes that I’d taken in class for more than an hour. Every day I would come home from pretending to be in class (save one class that I actually felt wasn’t too unpleasant to continue attending, and was straightforward enough that I felt still engaged me even though I didn’t look over notes or do required readings) and spend my time on some mindless, anxiety-relieving activity (eg usually computer game, and/or watching YouTube videos), feeling dread and guilt the entire time, until I went to bed. In the first few weeks of living alone in a big, new city, in which I didn’t make any friends nor did I chat with old friends, I went to bed with a raw, harrowing, and hollow feeling in my chest.

The reality was that I was failing all five classes, and I knew it.

II.

18 year-old-me who — earlier that year — had been met with the response “I don’t think you have those”, and “You seem fine” after approaching one parent and opening up for the first and only time that year that I believe I have anxiety and depression and want to find a psychologist, didn’t think my parents would react very well if they found out I was failing all my classes.

(I almost never communicated with my other parent back then, so not a thought even occurred to me that approaching the other parent was an option.)

In the past, I didn’t think of It, “It” encompassing:

• My chronic avoidance of studying

• Failing classes

As a problem that could be worked on, and potentially be solved, by having a conversation with my family.

I thought I would just be punished once my parents found out.

I didn’t at any time imagine myself having a conversation with either parent. I didn’t hypothesize, “What would happen if I told a parent?”. I didn’t even speculate on what punishments would ensue; the only rule on my mind about how to go about things was: They. Must. Not. Find. Out.

Although the dismay in living a life where I was motivated by deception was exorbitant, and I was in every waking moment drowning in unrelenting self-loathing and guilt, I literally thought of the only step forward as avoidance.

III.

It was the first serious lie that wasn’t by omission that I told. If I remember correctly, my sibling was also at the parking lot on the one occasion when my Mom asked. And if I remember correctly, I followed up what I said with some brief commentary about the A- class, meant to confirm why it was an A- and not “another” A.

And they didn’t ask anything more after that.

So really, not a single one of my family had any insight into how I was doing. When they got home, word soon spread to my Dad about my grades, and he believed the lie that my Mom and sibling had swallowed as well.

Clearly, the fact that they accepted my lie so readily and unquestionably, meant among other things, that they were very wrong about things about me; what my experience of consciousness is like, in which ways I think and what I tend to think about, what my motivations are and are not, and how motivated I feel to do things that would be good for my future on a day-to-day basis. Since no fuss or objection had been made about the answer I gave them, I figured that my lie must’ve been pretty in-line with their predictions that were by now, obvious to me alone, were objectively wrong.

Do you know what it’s like to not feel seen?

Do you know what it’s like to have a really bad time, and for no one to acknowledge that?

(including no one online; I felt like my situation was too shameful and strange to announce even to strangers on the Internet under a not-legally-mine name)

It is a huge shame that the lie — that I do not have debilitating avoidance problems — was so simple to tell and easy to swallow, and that the truth — that I do — is so much more time-consuming to convince people of, because of their priors about me. It’s a shame that the truth is what requires enormous amounts of evidence, because the amount of effort it takes deters me from wanting to tell the truth, and I generally think telling the truth is the right thing to do.

(My parents found out in summer 2016 when my Mom opened a letter that the school had sent them in the mail, that I didn’t know would be sent and didn’t intercept, that informed them I didn’t earn any credits for either semester. My Mom was in shock and disbelief at first, and then showed the letter to my Dad.)

IV.

In 2015-2016, I didn’t tell any of my friends either. I briefly thought about messaging them on Facebook about how I was doing, then slammed that idea shut with What could they even understand if they knew? I assumed that they were all actively making achievements academically.

As circumstances in my life changed and I changed in response to them without updating friends (nor them directly asking me to), I no longer began considering the people in high school who I once thought of as “active friends”.

In the past nine years, I aimed to avoid telling my high school friends about my academic failures.

It wasn’t as if going into a friendship in high school my friends knew that I was painfully avoidant at great costs – they thought I was a normal person, albeit more on the autistic end of the spectrum than average. Would they be willing to identify me as a friend if they found out I was a huge failure academically, and also a liar?

Would they look down on me? Mock me? Devalue me?

It’s 2024 now, and I can now say I have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, which I think would make high school friends view my task avoidant tendencies, and academic failures as less scandalous than they would otherwise.

Having a clean, one-word, widely accepted ~medical diagnosis~ to give to people now, alongside the information about dropping out of university (including failing and withdrawing from 12/13 classes over 3 semesters; the aforementioned fall 2015 and spring 2016, as well as a later stint at university during first-episode psychosis in fall 2021, for a total of 0.5 credits — PS: tuition costs my family money too) makes me feel less ashamed about my multiple failures at university…

and less embarrassed at the prospect of other people knowing.

It’s 2024 now. Nine years have passed since high school: Are my high school friends ready to believe that I’m not mentally able in some ways?

V.

What could convince them, if at all?¹

It’s really easy to get someone to understand that psychosis can interfere with daily functioning in ways that make you fail classes.

It’s harder to explain my avoidant tendencies that were already there before first-episode psychosis.

(I don’t even understand them.)

((Sometimes I wonder if my brain is full of unproductive content instead of thoughts about what I ought to do step-by-step each day to meet goals in the future. It wasn’t even like I had goals for the future back then.))

VI.

I’m sorry that I lied — I don’t think of it as a choice, but if someone wanted to argue that it was “a choice”, I would probably think about their response instead of automatically disagreeing.

And I still don’t see what else I could have done at the time – in the specific situation that I was in. Maybe if my parents had been more educated about mental health, I would have been not extremely resistant to telling them that I was avoiding studying, and later avoiding classes.

I’m not angry at anyone; just angry in general. And I’m more than anything, glad that I now feel like I have the right to explain my version of the story.

I also don’t think lying helped me out in the end; it probably would’ve been better if my parents found out earlier (eg if the school had sent them a letter of my transcript in the winter holidays in December 2015 instead of summer 2016, after 2 entire semesters had passed).

Lying prolonged the terribleness of living a life motivated by deception, and was at the opportunity cost of potentially changing anything in my life that could have lead to a preferred end today.

It placates me to be ready and willing enough to tell the truth now. I want to say the moral of the story is not to lie, but I also think sometimes – including in this case – there is no alternative path to take.

The water filled my lungs

I screamed so loud

But no one heard a thing

Rain came pouring down

When I was drowning

That’s when I could finally breathe

And by morning

Gone was any trace of you

I think I am finally clean

— Clean (Taylor’s Version), Taylor Swift

I’m hoping that maybe there could be some kind of a lesson in telling this, including to future me if I ever am in a situation where I’m considering lying by omission or not (such as whether I tell someone specific I meet if I have schizophrenia or not.)

I.

I thought I’d write a post about my thoughts on the thought experiment Mary’s Room, because I’ve seen a post about it on Substack recently, and a few other posts about it.

“The experiment describes Mary, a scientist who exists in a black-and-white world where she has extensive access to physical descriptions of color, but no actual perceptual experience of color. Mary has learned everything there is to learn about color, but she has never actually experienced it for herself. The central question of the thought experiment is whether Mary will gain new knowledge when she goes outside of the colorless world and experiences seeing in color.” — From Wikipedia, 11/11/24

If one literally means “Mary has learned everything there is to learn about color”, then I interpret that to mean she knows the exact way she will think, feel, behave once she sees the colour red.

Some examples are:

• She knows that once she sees red, she’ll think, “This does look a little like a certain gray that’s in between black and white (not extremely light or dark gray)”, or “So it is true that Object A can be red”. Or “There was an Object A that’s red in this other room all along. And that Object A was brought in by Bob, and Bob brought it in at 9:00 AM 45 days ago, and Bob purchased it from The Red Store in The Red Object A aisle which is beside The Red Object B aisle, and this red product was manufactured in Country X…” 

• She knows exactly how surprised she’ll feel, and exactly how excited, and exactly how delighted she’ll feel. She knows exactly how much she will enjoy the experience. She knows how eager she’ll feel in anticipation of seeing red again, in the case she wishes to see it again.

• She knows that once she sees red, she’ll tell all the other neuroscientists she has on NeuroscientistIn about the room or hallway or other vicinity she saw red, and her mental state at the time she saw red, including what she felt and thought. She knows exactly which details about red will be salient for her to include in her gushing to other neuroscientists about red.

I also interpret it to mean:

• She knows exactly how she will think, feel, and behave the second time she sees red… and the third time… and the fourth time… until the end of her life.

• She knows the exact way someone else thinks, feels, behaves, when they see red for the first time. (And the second time… and every time.)

• She knows the exact way the first human alive ever thought, felt, and behaved when they saw red. Were they in psychosis when they saw red? Were they in mania? Were they walking when they saw red?

  (…and she knows what all the other humans who have ever lived thought, felt, and behaved every time when they saw red!)

So if Mary knows literally everything about red, I don’t think she would know anything new if she were to see red for the first time.

I would argue that something learnable ought to be shareable (unless you want to be able to say things like, “I learned something only I can know about myself”. And if you do, you can alternately say, “I experienced XYZ” – which is, and I mean literally, not transferable. Before experiencing something, you can know what it’s like to experience XYZ, but that won’t mean you have experienced it.)

II.

But I’m not sure how literal people mean to be when making the statement that “Mary has learned everything there is to learn about color”. For me, the answers to the central question of the thought experiment matter most of all in a practical context. Before we decide what the conclusion should be, let’s take a look at two cases, and what each of their implications are:

Case 1: You haven’t learned (from observing secondary/tertiary/non-self made primary sources) from other people telling you about their experiences. Meanwhile, you HAVE had firsthand experience.

I’m going to use the most salient firsthand experience I’ve had without having acquired knowledge prior to having that experience about what it would or could be like for me. This shall thereby be the experience of psychosis.

I was in psychosis for >=1017 (the 1017 only starts from the earliest day I have solid recorded, time-stamped, digital evidence that I can still access today of a particular delusion of grandeur).

In 2023, when my psychiatrist in IP first told me he thought I had been in psychosis, I didn’t believe him at first. I gaffed. Psychosis? With only the most accidental, layperson understanding, I rejected the result of his analysis: I said something along the lines of, “I think you’re mistaken, I don’t think I’ve been in psychosis.”

But I definitely do remember having thoughts in the throes of psychosis in 2022 that ‘life had suddenly changed’ and ‘this has been a sudden abnormal period of my life’.

I knew I had more energy, motivation, and I had been through a period of accelerated discovery and decision-making – I just didn’t know those were manifestations of psychosis alongside hypomania.

I made observations during this abnormal period of my life. I was more productive, I did a lot more cooking, cleaning, housework in general, including snow shoveling. I took a lot more photography and short videography using my phone. I recorded my cooking, cleaning, before and after of snow shoveling. After first episode-psychosis ended, I spent hours deleting photos and videos recorded on my phone.

I made a new main Gmail account, with the account name having a metaphorical meaning that referred to the content of a delusion. I began sending emails to my family under the new account, including making requests to my parents because I wanted to pursue delusion-fueled activities. Sending emails at all to family – especially being the first sender – was unusual for me, since I almost never replied to emails before, let alone started activities using email.

One day, I made nine more Gmail accounts, for the sake of creating Google Documents in each. I had a general, mostly separate plan or “theme” for what the Google Documents would be about in each of six of the accounts, with end-goals I wanted to work toward in mind for each Google account.

I had a higher rate of creating new Google Documents during FEP. Within each account, I colour-coded documents by background, set the default page orientation to landscape, made all margins 0, and I’d never felt the need to format documents in this particular way before. Each Google account was roughly ascribed its own “colour palette”. Documents within Gmail Account 1 on Subject A might have a burgundy background, on Subject B brown, Subject C dark orange, etc. Documents within Gmail Account 2 might have pastel backgrounds — green, pink, yellow, etc. Documents within Gmail Account 3 might have only light blue backgrounds.

I also made a lot of documents on MS Paint, and on a graphic design app on my phone, that when looking back now, look “overtly psychotic” to me (ie the documents feature mismatching colours, haphazard, grammatically incorrect English, are disorganized, and are based on delusional content).

I also noticed that colours “stuck out more”, as if they were more saturated, while I didn’t literally believe the colours of objects changed. I also noticed that I was making a lot of metaphors, analogies, and interpreting a lot of things I came across as symbolism.

I didn’t write anything about what it was like to experience life at the time of my first episode of psychosis, at least not focused on the affective, cognitive, and behavioural changes that came with psychosis. 

But I would argue that just because you haven’t taken the time to write down a fact, or you haven’t had an exact, conscious thought pop up in your internal dialogue of that fact (eg “The curtains to the left of me are slightly brown, and the sun is setting, so I should close the curtains soon), doesn’t mean you don’t know the facts.

And the information about psychosis I gathered is applicable to my life: I may be able to recognize the symptoms and signs of being in an abnormal mental state sooner rather than later, now that I’ve experienced said abnormal mental state for the first time, and have had almost 4 years since it’s onset to reflect on, think about, and understand what its symptoms and signs are.

All this to say, when it came to psychosis, I do think I had knowledge without classic ‘textbook reading’ acquisition.

This example has been all about the experience of psychosis so far – but what about the experience of seeing the colour red? Does Mary gain any knowledge from seeing red?

Well, for one thing, Mary would probably believe with higher probability than before, “That object can be red”. Moreover, Mary would know what thoughts cross her mind when she first sees the colour red. Mary would know how she personally feels like while seeing the colour red, though she could’ve been 95% sure of how she would feel before from reading textbooks or Tumblr posts.

If Mary sees a red object again some time in the future, so long as the memory of seeing the original red object can be accessed by her, Mary will know, “This object is also red, like the first red object I saw.”

If this Mary is rational, she would have the advantage of being more sure of particular things that aren’t currently observable by non-self humans in satisfying ways, these “things” being her own feelings, emotions, thoughts, behaviours, motivations, desires, worries, fears etc (if she experiences any of these) after seeing the colour red.

Going back to “Mary has learned everything there is to learn about colour”, if you mean that she has learned everything that we deem necessary for a neuroscientist to know and nothing beyond that, I would argue that as a neuroscientist, she learns new facts — they just aren’t considered neuroscience.

III.

Case 2: You have only learned (from observing secondary/tertiary/non-self made primary sources) from other people telling you about their experiences. Meanwhile, you do NOT have firsthand experience.

So this Mary, if she is rational, and knows she has potential of being given more evidence in the future, cannot be as sure of the above non-satisfyingly observable by self things as the Mary who has seen red.

But she can know things about other people’s experiences of red. She can know the history of red; something she cannot experience firsthand. 

In the example of psychosis, if you have learned that what you’re going through is called “psychosis” (ie you’ve read or heard about the signs and symptoms of psychosis), you would hopefully be able to detect that you’re going through psychosis. If you’ve read that there can be severe life consequences to untreated psychosis, you may be more likely to seek treatment for it. And if you’ve read that antipsychotics are an effective treatment for psychosis, you will be incentivized to go to your doctor to get prescribed antipsychotics, and adhere to the antipsychotics.

Clearly the advantages this Mary would have is having the opportunity to learn about people’s overall experience in a relatively painless way (as opposed to not knowing that you have an illness treatable with antipsychotics, and not adhering to medication for that reason, and then learning about life consequences that way).

In each case – firsthand observing or experiencing, and learning from other sources – Mary learns things, but they are different things.

I.

I read the abstract of this article (Rhoades, 2017), and almost nothing besides that, but noticed it mentions cell phone usage among homeless adults in CA:

“The vast majority (94%) currently owned a cell phone, although there was considerable past 3-month turnover in phones (56%) and phone numbers (55%). More than half currently owned a smartphone, and 86% of those used Android operating systems. Most (85%) used a cell phone daily, 76% used text messaging, and 51% accessed the Internet on their cell phone. One-third reported no past 3-month Internet use. These findings suggest that digital technology may be a feasible means of disseminating health and wellness programs to this at-risk population, though important caveats are discussed”

The rest of Part I of the post hinges on homeless people indeed having access to cell phones.

I’ve read Details That You Should Include In Your Article On How We Should Do Something About Mentally Ill Homeless People, including some of the cases in which people end up not receiving medication that would treat symptoms of their mental illnesses.

I don’t know if any of these “things that can be done” I’m bringing up are being done already or would be effective at all, so these are just some thoughts/questions/IDEK after reading about typical cases.

“The patient is confused and sedated, which is a common side effect of antipsychotic drugs, and maybe if they made it to the doctor then the doctor could recommend something that would prevent this (realistically only the top 5% of doctors catering to the homeless will go this far), but they can’t make it to the doctor because they’re confused and sedated.”

“The patient went to their appointment with the welfare bureaucracy that was supposed to give them a free subway pass, but in the waiting room they spotted a drug dealer who had a grudge against them, so they left because they worried they’d get beaten up.”

• Are appointments via phone (preferably with no requirement of Zoom or a smartphone in particular) with doctors (or with bureaucracy people!) legal?

“They lose their prescription and don’t know how to get another one. Or they call their insurance, insurance whines “these drugs cost $500 and you lost your last prescription too, we’re not paying”, and they don’t know what to do.”

“The patient was in the hospital with sepsis during their psychiatrist appointment, and nobody told them how to get an alternative psychiatry appointment.”

• Does anyone (eg a nurse or a bureaucracy person) offer each homeless person a contact number with their psychiatrist or someone who’ll reach their psychiatrist, and ask to make sure it’s saved in their phone contacts?

• Do they have anyone (eg a nurse or a bureaucracy person) texting or calling people about appointment reminders the day before the appointment, and making sure they are still available at those times?

I would assume that pharmacies already send text notifications and/or call letting people know when a prescription refill is ready, since that’s what my pharmacy has been doing.

“The patient wrote their appointment time on a piece of paper, which they left in their tent, which got flooded in a rainstorm and all their stuff was washed away.”

• Are mentally ill homeless people prioritized when it comes to appointment times? It might be easier for someone to come consistently if their appointment is always — for example — on a Wednesday, or always 1:00 PM, or always Wednesday at 1:00 PM. The mentally ill homeless people’s appointments could be booked further in advance, and the mentally ill non-homeless people could have the remaining time slots.

• Can you give people sturdier cards with information on resources (eg numbers to call, addresses, appointment times and dates) on them?

II.

Here are some slightly unhinged ideas that might not produce desirable results, and/or have too many downsides:

Would changing visual aspects of medication, and/or medication containers reduce medication theft?

“Another homeless person steals their pill bottle thinking it might be opioids; later they will grind them up, snort them, and have the worst day of their lives.””

The antipsychotic tablets I’ve received in my life have been indiscriminate white pills, and prescription bottles I’ve received for various prescription medications a translucent-y orange or green. I don’t know if this would work (maybe opioid tablets come in all shapes and sizes, maybe people will grind and snort a tablet regardless of how it looks like), but to discourage stealing of antipsychotics, maybe antipsychotic tablets could be manufactured to be a colour and/or shape that opioid tablets usually aren’t.

(I’m not sure if opioid manufacturers have any incentive to make opioids look like antipsychotics.)

Maybe various categories medications can be given to people in different coloured containers (eg red containers for antipsychotics, blue for antidepressants) — but maybe that wouldn’t matter because someone could easily assume a person is hiding opioids in any prescription medication container, and steal the container anyway.

Maybe if containers were transparent and tablet colours could be more easily seen, and if the colour of tablets can de-incentivize someone from stealing, that could reduce cases of prescription medication theft, but maybe this barely matters.

Would increasing rewards for obtaining prescription for mentally ill homeless people medication increase medication adherence?

Sometimes not all the reward in the world can make a task possible; there’s a good chance this wouldn’t work at all, and would be a waste of resources. But maybe people will prioritize and make it to more appointments with doctors and go through all the steps necessary to obtain prescriptions if going to all the necessary locations to do those things were more rewarded.

Maybe each time a prescription is given to homeless person (…if there’s an electronic medical database that identifies whether someone is homeless or not), or if a homeless person makes it to their doctor’s appointment, they could be given a small amount of cash, or a coupon for a MacDonald’s meal or similar meal at a popular and convenient restaurant.

Would increasing education on mental illnesses (eg in compulsory school, IP, jail) increase medication adherence?

This one is less about improving access of medications to mentally ill people, and more about getting them to voluntarily want to adhere to antipsychotics in the first place.

I think that compulsory schooling should include more education about psychotic illnesses and their treatment options.

Maybe courses could be made available on psychotic illnesses and treatment of them, including education on the benefits of antipsychotics, and consequences of psychosis, and people could have a reduced sentence to jail or stay in IP for attendance to these courses.

(…Or you could send people to jail if they don’t attend these courses.)

I.

Some people strongly believe in “not comparing yourself to others”.

I think I get this. Sometimes you may feel like there’s nothing you can’t do compared to the person beside you — and you figure out the hard way that you’re wrong.

I say, don’t always expect the same from yourself as from another.

And I will say, what we ought to do is contrast ourselves from others. Wouldn’t it increase our wellbeing if we contrasted ourselves so thoroughly that we knew before our struggles, such that we could prepare for them?

Some things can be tested for; you have limitations.

Some questions to ask yourself include:

What positive qualities do I believe I have a deficiency of relative to others?

What was possible for me to do in the past?

What was not possible for me to do in the past?

What do I want to spend more time on? What do I want to spend less time on? (Both of these questions ought to be considered if wanting to make changes in time expenditure.)

Sometimes you expect yourself to perform at a level — then you perform under it. The way I try to frame things is that this means there was something wrong with your expectations — not with your performance.

“I failed at my attempt at XYZ.” —> “I failed to predict how I would perform at XYZ.”

“I couldn’t perform to the same capacity as someone else.” —> “I failed to detect all of the ways I would differ from someone else.”

II.

So what are some settings in which you can search for differences between yourself and others?

Compulsory Schooling:

School allows you to compare yourself to samples of the population that are age-matched, and location-matched.

Every day at school, you have the opportunity to observe your behaviour relative to your given sample: How often do you raise your hand in class? How often do you talk to other kids in class when the teacher is talking? How much do you talk when you’re standing in a line? How do you feel before public speaking? How often are you surrounded with friends? Is it easy for you to find a partner for a group activity? How much do you struggle with deadlines? How much do you struggle with paperwork?

There’s also seeing where you fall in standardized testing in school, as well as observing people’s marks for individual tests, if that’s your thing.

This is the main reason why I personally wouldn’t homeschool my hypothetical children — they would be at a disadvantage in knowing who they are within the population.

Health Care Providers:

If you open up to a psychiatrist, they will evaluate if you meet criteria for any psychiatric disorders, and if you do, they might prescribe you with medication that alleviates some of the differences that are harmful to you.

A non-psychiatrist doctor can detect somatic differences between what you currently have, and what is healthy for you to have.

Group Activities:

I’ve never participated in extracurricular sports, theatre, dance, or other normal settings in which people work in groups as they’re growing up.

Although I don’t intend to go back to gaming (nor do I recommend playing an MMO to most individuals), I think playing an MMO from August 2018 to February 2021 (age 21 to 24) did help me learn some more subtle differences between an introverted population and I.

I learned that I have more limited ways to feel pleasure. Most other gamers were content playing a variety of classes with a a variety of roles, but it was utmost important for me to play the one specialization in GW2 I enjoyed far more than the others — with its visuals and sound effects and skill abilities and role in group — in the PVE content that I enjoyed most, fractals, not raids.

When I started playing something other than my favourite class began it wasn’t meta at the time, I began to lose interest in the ~2-hour daily runs. And weeks after I dropped from the static.

I make more small talk in the chat interface than most people.

Then, there were some things I noticed about myself, that I’m not sure if were normal were not:

• I’m eager to communicate with people in private messages in GW2 about personal situations. Those strong negative emotions that I pretend not to feel sometimes? Yeah, that’s where one of my outlets used to be.

• I feel more fulfillment when I have a role in an organized group with a routine, and when I’m participating in Discord VC.

• I lowkey shirk from leadership opportunities.

Family:

If you’re interacting with each other all day, eg on vacation, what are everyone’s roles?

I.

IQ is only useful insofar as it’s exhibited through behaviour, which is sometimes, and to varying extents, measurable by tests.

(How much does IQ matter if you’re drunk? Or dead.)

(Would you do the same on testing if you’re sleep-deprived or not?)

Or maybe we could represent IQ as not one numeral, but a range that is possible for an individual to be in - that can vary from day-to-day, moment-to-moment, with some individuals having greater ranges and some more stable IQs.

(“That would require more testing!” one might think; I only mean this theoretically.)

You can differentiate IQ into “optimal IQ", being one’s IQ under optimal conditions, and “operational IQ”, being the latter as the IQ under usual conditions.

Of course, with the former definition you’re excluding all the times you have non-optimal conditions.

These conditions might include experiences of: (select all that apply!)

Agitation
Anger
Anxiety
Calorie restriction, fasting (including fasting high)
Clinically delusional thinking
Comatose state
Compulsively behavung
Daydreaming
Delirium
Dissociation
Dizziness
Drowsiness
Fantasizing
Feelings of abandonment
Feeling excessive guilt
Feeling hatred
Hypomania, mania
Inebriation
Motion sickness
Mistrust, suspiciousness
Nausea
Pain
Paranoia
Psychosis
Sleep deprivation
Ticcing
Tipsiness
Traumatic flashbacks

+ I'm sure a lot more that I haven’t identified and listed.

It means that just because two people have the same optimal IQ, at any point their performance may still be different.

II.

How much does each condition impair your IQ — at any given point in time? How debilitating overall — including physically — is each condition for you?

And how often do you experience a non-optimal condition throughout your average day?

Personally, I don’t think I’ve even identified using language all the ones I experience.

And it’s not just that this variation would show up if you did IQ testing at random times, it’s that it shows up in your performance at work, in school, and in leisure-time activities.

For some (including myself), it means, “My output isn’t as reliable/dependable/consistent and my total output isn’t as high as others.”

Your predictions for, and feelings about your output would fluctuate too, which would affect your self-concept, and probably not in a good way.

This is the long explanation for what it means to be unwell — especially mentally — relative to others: because symptoms prevent optimal conditions from occurring, you only function optimally when it comes to IQ-requiring activities a fraction of the time that others do.

(“So, you’re saying people with disabilities are really disabled!” Yup. That is exactly what I’m saying.)

And perhaps you could measure how disabled someone is by their atypical conditions (not limited to, but including psychiatric symptoms) by the difference between their optimal IQ and a central tendency of their IQ.

I.

You’ve heard of hyperfocus. You’ve heard of drowsiness. You’ve heard of headaches. You’ve heard of confusion, and have probably heard people often experience it during psychosis.

There is a state I find myself sometimes in — this most frequently happens in the throes of psychosis, and can happen alongside scattered thoughts / markedly loosened associations.

I would guess there is a state common among those during psychosis that may not yet be named; I’m going to call it the state of having a “muddled mind”, for lack of another term to use.

I mean “muddled mind” to include the criteria:

• An intense feeling of confusion despite no apparent source/s for the confusion.

• Intensive thoughts (I’m making this term up now) — these are thoughts that feel like they have a different quality about them — a “heaviness” or “denseness” to them, and that they’re “enveloping” you or have an “aura” around you, than normal thoughts; they have the same or similar feeling as intrusive thoughts but with the content being non-distressing; they feel a little like the general state of hyperfocus, but are slightly more attention-grabbing and intense; intensive thoughts are words in your internal dialogue that feel like they are being written in italics. Intensive thoughts vs. normal thoughts feel like listening to A World Alone by Lorde with noise-cancelling headphones vs. listening to it with desktop speakers.

• A general feeling of malaise, similar to the feeling of having a low fever.

• …and having these feelings last for some time (e.g., at least 15 minutes), and disturb you intensely enough to prevent you from doing anything externally rewarding in that time (including read a novel). You can play mindless, addictive games on your phone. You can stare off into a wall. The state feels unpleasant, with part of it feeling like the “world is weighing down in your thoughts".

Being in a state of muddled mind feels similar to each of these states:

• nausea

• headache (e.g., fever, hangover)

• sleep-deprivation, absent of a sleep-deprivation high (e.g., from not having slept for 48 hours)

• drowsy (e.g., a side effect from medications despite having slept enough), and/or

• drunk (i.e., a point past tipsy — muddled mind is a slightly more powerful feeling than tipsy)

• dizziness (eg from a spinning teacups amusement park ride)

II.

The word “psychotic” means a lot of things across a lot of contexts, even though I wish it didn’t mean some things or wasn’t used in some contexts.

Before knowing what the clinical meaning of psychotic was, I didn’t realize I was experiencing psychosis.

(I had to be told I had been experiencing it by four psychiatrists, and then I looked up what it meant months later when I was finally told that I “have a 90% chance of having schizophrenia” by my current psychiatrist, and then I believed them).

Sometimes, my mind felt crystal-clear during first-episode psychosis — including (though not always) while having thoughts that only retrospectively are clear-cut delusions.

Looking back, there are times in psychosis that I “felt more psychotic” — or rather, felt like I was in an altered mental state more so than other times in psychosis, which wasn’t necessarily when I was acting on delusions, experiencing powerful emotions as a result of delusions or other people’s reactions to my delusions, or when my thoughts dwelled on delusions that ended up having long-term consequences to my and/or other’s lives.

I tend to “feel most psychotic” — and recognize that something different from that norm is happening — when I have scattered thoughts, and/or when I’m in a state of muddled mind. I remember thinking multiple times that the state of my mind felt abnormal” when I was simultaneously experiencing these in the last months of my first episode of psychosis in 2023.

Meanwhile, other manifestations of my psychosis, including paranoid and persecutory delusions (the beliefs themselves, the feelings resulting from them, as well as other people’s reactions to them, many of which were shocking to me because they were not what I had anticipated) did not flip the “Something is abnormal with my mind” switch in my head. It’s humbling to write this, but other people’s reactions to my delusions made me think, “People around me are suddenly behaving really abnormally”, and didn’t draw my attention to any cognitive changes of mine.

Believing that something “abnormal” was going on with my mind (which is what my internal dialogue termed my mental experience during muddled mindedness) even when I was in psychosis took a lot less time than agreeing with psychiatrists that I had been in “psychosis” — a word used by laypeople outside of clinical contexts — even outside of psychosis.

III.

Evidence of my first paranoid delusions can be traced to messages I sent a former friend on Discord on 01/24/2021. I experienced hypomania before the onset of my first paranoid delusions. While the hypomania manifested, I recognized the state I was in as abnormal, but wasn’t about to recognize the paranoid delusions as something abnormal while they were happening until years later — in 2023 after my first-episode of psychosis ended.

I remember multiple times in November-December 2020 to January-February 2021 looking up the criteria for Bipolar II Disorder on Wikipedia, since I had heard of mania and knew it encompassed elevated mood (which I identified myself as experiencing while it was happening), and that mania was a component of Bipolar Disorder.

I read about the signs and symptoms of mania, and how there were the subtypes cyclothymia, Bipolar I, and Bipolar II, and thought that perhaps I’d had experiences relating to cyclothymia and Bipolar II. But I was over 50% then sure that whatever I had was subclinical, and did not inform any healthcare provider at the time about what I had been experiencing.

I didn’t know that hypomania and psychosis were correlated; perhaps if I did, that would have increased my likelihood to recognize myself as experiencing psychosis, and increase the likelihood of receiving medical attention and treatment before events in psychosis escalated.

I begun noticing that I experienced these in 2024. I thought they were similar to intrusive thoughts, but didn’t have a name for them until…

…I read about this on Wikipedia:

"Unbidden thoughts are thoughts that come to mind without the subject directly or consciously meaning to think them. Inserted thoughts, while sharing the characteristic of unconsciously or indirectly being conjured, are distinct from unbidden thoughts because of the author of the thoughts. During an experience of unbidden thinking, the subject knows that they are the author of the thought even though they may not have consciously meant to think it. During the feeling of thought insertion, however, the subject feels as though the thought belongs to another person and was inserted into their own mind, making the author of the thought someone other than themselves." Source

(To be literal, I never think they were literally “inserted”, eg by another living being, or by a supernatural force.)

These thoughts announce what other people could think about me, and it “feels like” I involuntarily accessed the mind of someone who has observed me recently, when I know that I did not.

These thoughts feel “hushed”, appear suddenly, and can be relevant to the activity I’m currently doing, and where my thoughts are focused at the moment. They share the same quality of intensiveness that intrusive thoughts have, which I wrote about here:

“Intensive thoughts are thoughts that feel like they have a different quality about them — a “heaviness” or “denseness” to them, and that they’re “enveloping” you or have an “aura” around you, than normal thoughts; they have the same or similar feeling as intrusive thoughts but with the content being non-distressing; they feel a little like the general state of hyperfocus, but are slightly more attention-grabbing and intense; intensive thoughts are words in your internal dialogue that feel like they are being written in italics. Intensive thoughts vs. normal thoughts feel like listening to A World Alone by Lorde with noise-cancelling headphones vs. listening to it with desktop speakers”

E.g., I could be walking down an aisle in a supermarket, where my Mom is out of my sight, and involuntarily think, “ANONYMOUS 1997 IS SPENDING SUCH A LONG TIME IN THE SUPERMARKET!”. And I would know immediately that the thought belongs to my Mom. And I would also know that it’s not (likely to be) what she is currently thinking — out of all the things that she could be thinking of — at the moment.

(Another example is that as I’m writing for a blog, I have my normal internal dialogue running, and then I get hit with a thought from the left field.)

These thoughts are often fearful conjectures of what other people think of me. And so they might go (below as another visual representation of an unbidden thought):

“Anonymous 1997 overexplains things on their blog.” — (as felt thought by an unnamed reader).

There is this quality of it that feels different from the thought “I think my Mom could be thinking…” that might be experienced and more usefully called anxiety and/or paranoia; in those cases, there is greater belief that the person could be thinking whatever it is that crossed your mind.

(In contrast, I don’t believe that the other person is thinking what I thought of at the very moment at all - the thoughts are obviously things my mind made up on its own. I would know immediately it’s ‘one of those thoughts’ and dismiss it; just like how you might hear a famous line from a movie, and know immediately it’s probably scripted, or at least that the actor had said it with the awareness that it’s being filmed; that it’s not the same as an unstaged moment.)

It’s also different from when you’re trying to put yourself into someone else’s position, e.g., pretending you’re a non-writer who’s reading your blog, and thinking, “So this is what this person’s blog’s is about…”

And they’re different from thoughts when you’re ruminating, and deep into entertaining a scenario that’s undesirable.

These thoughts are abrupt/sudden, and around one short sentence long. Having this kind of thought feel like an interruption, though if you’re hyperfocusing on something while it arrives, it may be easier to ignore during the intensity of your internal dialogue.

How often do other sufferers of obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and/or psychotic disorders experience these?

Ought they be considered a form of intrusive thought? (One could frame them as “an intrusive thought about what someone may think about you”.)

I.

I haven’t heard a word for something I’ve begun noticing in the past few months that I experience.

In 2024, there definitely have been times (a unhinged guess of >50 times, without recording the times) when I’ve briefly thought of extremely improbable (99-100% not going to happen, according to me, both during, immediately before and immediately after the thought) scenarios, often about obtaining something desirable that holds personal significance to me (e.g., acceptance, acknowledgement, social recognition, close friendship, or wealth).

These kinds of thoughts hold greater belief in what will happen than thoughts during daydreams, in which one realizes that one is imagining a reality different from the current one; the former lack that awareness, and hold a certainty of belief closer to the certainties one would have during a psychotic delusion; e.g., for a moment thinking there is a 90-99% chance (unhinged guess) of something happening.

Unlike delusions, during these thoughts, you realize that the odds are improbable, and the situation is unlikely – but you somehow think the thing will happen to you anyway.

Unlike delusions that are believed during idiopathic psychosis, these beliefs do not last hours a day (and across days, weeks, months, and/or even years), and unlike daydreams, which last for minutes to hours, these beliefs last for less than one-to… five? seconds. (I haven’t timed.) They’re as brief as typical intrusive thoughts. There’s not enough time in which one believes in them for more than approximately “one-to-four sentences worth” of thoughts to develop; these thoughts are thus “fleeting” and also lacking in floridity.

They describe what-ifs, e.g., “What if my super-enthusiastic-about-neurodivergence professor really likes my presentation on severe mental illness, and I send them a personal email about my experiences with schizophrenia, and they become my personal friend, and read my blog, and comment on it?”

(This is something I’ve thought as I walked from a school building to the bus stop one day.)

They can also be framed as times of jumping to conclusions in which you believe those conclusions for less than one-to-five (again, I dunno) seconds, after which you immediately dispel the conclusion.

II.

…as of now, I’m going to call these kinds of thoughts “fleeting prophecies”.

(I’m actually not sure what a “prophecy” IS. I realize that what I’m referring to are predictions that probably won’t happen, and originally I thought of calling them “fleeting delusions” - but I don’t want to conflate the already overused IME term “delusion” with one more thing that might not be caused by idiopathic psychoses. I’ve also thought of the term “fleeting beliefs”, which might have the downside of being too general-sounding, which could produce higher false positive rates. And I’ve also thought of “fleeting salvation”, which might be too spiritual-sounding, which could produce higher false negative rates among the non-spiritual.)

So, how does having a “fleeting prophecy” feel?

Well, it feels good.

Personally, it feels like a stronger high than an “I-haven’t-slept-for-24-hours high” (which I personally experience and will describe as a strong feeling of relaxation), and than a “I haven’t eaten in a while high” (“a feeling of gratification”), and than an “I-just-ran-10-kilometers high” (“a strong feeling of satisfaction”, and which I think is a stronger high overall than an “I-haven’t-slept-for-24-hours high”), and a stronger high than a self-induced vomiting high (“a strong feeling of relief”, and think is the strongest of these three non-drug induced highs).

Having a fleeting prophecy feels like what I, someone who’s never used illicit drugs, would describe as euphoric. It feels like you’re celebrating something, and your mind is saying, “Things will be so fine forever and ever, and easily so: what a wonderful world!

It does not merely feel like “getting your hopes up”; it feels easily, noticeably more euphoric than that.

The feeling starts when the belief arises, and lasts for some seconds longer after the belief is dispelled. After about an estimated, the feeling begins to dissipate, and at about ~30 seconds, I’m returned to feeling similar as I did before having the initial belief.

As for visual representations, these are visuals that represent how the euphoria from this phenomenon feels like to me.

With a false belief that lasts for less than one-to-five seconds, there usually is no opportunity to behave in ways supported by the belief, and what stands out to me is the euphoric feeling accompanied with the belief (I don’t know which comes first, if one does).

((I’ve also considered calling the condition “fleeting euphoria”, but as someone who’s never used illicit drugs recreationally, I don’t know if that’s conflating the term with something that’s too different to be mentioned.))

III.

At other times, this natural high lasts for minutes – in which my mind is consumed by fantasizing about a made-up scenario that tends to get more florid the longer I fantasize about it, and that isn’t absurdly impossible, but that I at some realize and become aware that is 99.999% sure not going to happen.

I find these distracting; they can happen when I’m in the middle of schoolwork, and the feeling is overwhelming enough to disengage me from activities such as comprehending standard sentences or from typing sentences I was in the midst of typing.

I’m not sure if this is subclinically associated with any named psychiatric conditions; I know I have them still at 40mg Latuda, a dosage at which florid delusions calling for urgency and ending up with appalling social results have stopped happening for me.

(If so, I guess schizophrenia? Hypomania? Schizotypal PD? OCD? ADHD?)

I.

Because early detection is preferred, I wrote down some of my personal perceptual, affective, cognitive, and psychomotor symptoms that I’m slipping into psychosis:

1. Strongly increased sense of urgency → increased goal-driven behaviour that is based on internal desires (not necessarily believed to lead to external rewards) 

2. Increased frequency of racing thoughts

3. Generally lowered inhibition during social interactions, similar to when influenced by alcohol

4. Increased frequency of thoughts that “jump” across different settings (thoughts featuring different times, different locations across the globe, and especially different people who don’t know that the other people in the thoughts close in time with each other exist)

5. Increased frequency of beliefs that result in anger

6. Increased frequency of thoughts on matters that involve specific people who may be present in my life

7. Increased emotional intensity of experiences (if my experiences are usually 5/10 of intensity, they become felt as 6/10-10/10 intensity)

8. Increased mistrustfulness within my surroundings, even if it’s hard to pinpoint what the mistrustfulness is about; increased vigilance i.e., increased worry that something might harm me and/or those I value in my life

9. Increased frequency of ASMR-like experiences, and increased perceived contrast between colours: “more saturated” colours in a “dimmer” environment”; “brighter” light colours including whites, and “darker” dark colours; “louder” clicks of light switches in a “quieter” setting

10. Increased frequency of seeing something, and relating it as a symbol or metaphor for something else

Here are some signs that I’m sometimes able to notice about myself when I’m slipping into psychosis:

1. Occasional increased frequency of abbreviation usage, grammatical errors, and stylistic idiosyncrasy when writing — including when typing online to others — due to feeling increased need to get thoughts out quickly

2. Increased frequency of going outside when it’s cold (for reasons that don’t net external rewards), and feeling less physiologically bothered by the cold

3. Increased frequency of simple motor tics

4. Increased time spent on obsessions

5. Increased time spent on compulsions

6. Increased distractibility, decreased sustained attention; increased activity on certain websites, such as Pinterest and Twitter; decreased activities on other websites, such as Tumblr and forums

7. Increased frequency of grabbing the first thing I see, e.g., a pencil, instead of spending more time and using fine motor skills to access something hidden from my field-of-view, e.g., the pen that I normally write notes with

8. Loss of functional fixedness when moving or using objects (i.e., the innovative placement of various objects in space)

9. Increased frequency of restricted movements, sometimes leading to the precarious placement of objects, and/or creation of surroundings inconvenient for future usage of the items or one’s previous goals, in absence of environmental constraints (e.g., stacking objects in which the physical retrieval order from top-to-bottom is inconvenient for future usage)

II.

Here are some descriptions for movements that I personally think feel less indicative of psychosis to me vs. feels more indicative of psychosis of me — i.e., psychomotor signs visible to the person experiencing them, that others can potentially notice as well:

A personal anecdote: I don’t think “abnormal posture” is useful to include when asking sufferers to screen themselves for first-episode psychosis — I think it would increase the chance of false negatives — personally, it was too vague for me to have initially related to it. When I first heard “abnormal posture” brought up by my psychiatrist, I thought of many possibilities. I thought of examples of “abnormal posture” such as “waving hands frantically back and forth in the air”, and “crawling on the floor when you’re physically able to walk”, and “playing leap-frog inside the first-floor of a house”. So I thought, “Nope, abnormal posture? Not me, I haven’t been experiencing that recently.”

It’s also hard for me to recognize as a sign because a) I don’t see the entirety of my posture like an outside observer in space would and am sometimes not aware when it’s taking place, b) if I’m in one posture for a long time, that usually means my attention is fixated somewhere else (e.g., arranging objects or writing) so that I’m not consciously having thoughts about my body positioning, and c) I do not feel confidently aware of what the “normal” postures other people tend to find themselves in are. And then, with d) It doesn’t feel any type of way to me! It doesn’t feel like tiring posture, exhausting posture, straining posture, it feels physically comfortable to me at the time — and therefore is not even felt as a symptom.

(I’m not usually going about my day thinking, “Someone observing my body positioning from one (or various) angles would observe that I’m positioned abnormally relative to objects in space relative to ways of positioning seen in the general population”.)

I prefer the term “restricted movements” because what I usually see is the movements of my hands and forearms performing actions.

(One could be performing a contemporary dance, and exhibiting “abnormal postures” frequently throughout it; but this ought not to be classified as a symptom of psychosis. But hey, on the other hand, performing a contemporary dance generally does not involve restricted/”stiff”-looking movement.)

Now that I’ve read that it’s a sign of psychosis, I’m more attentive to when my posturing is abnormal.

III.

During my first episode of psychosis, I didn’t experience any hallucinations — only delusions. Nonetheless, the episode did include differences from my usual sensory experiences. These are analogies suggesting what the having of perceptual symptoms feels like to me, in case this would help one recognize them in oneself:

IV.

Accompanied by delusions were many feelings and adjectives that described them, that I felt more frequently during first-episode psychosis than any previous time in my life. Some feelings were the result of actions that I did in first-episode psychosis that were witnessed by others (i.e., I might not do those same actions now with awareness about my disorder), and did not arise concurrent with delusions. This part is just for FEP — I had increased frequencies of these feelings (often as a part of having delusions, hypomania, or after actions and reactions from others to my actions fueled by delusions and/or during hypomania):

Being psychotic doesn’t just make you have a higher chance of being wrong due to increased biases experienced during psychosis, but it also tends to make the people around you more wrong!

POV: See, I tricked you. The minute you clicked this page, the roles have been reversed. I have bad news… for you. You are now me. There is now this rare thing that is Mostly Bad To Other Humans that you’re 90% sure you have, and people are really good at making sure others know it’s Mostly Bad To Other Humans. This mostly bad thing is called schizophrenia!

(Bold of me to assume you don’t already have schizophrenia, right?!)

How much will you hide the knowledge that you have it from others?

How much will you tell others?

We make decisions about situations like this all the time — e.g., how well-calibrated do you think people are about your age? If the answer if not very, do you tell them your age right off the bat, or do you purposely remain a bystander to their potentially far-off beliefs?

For some reason, in our society it’s okay to let other humans be somewhat wrong about our ages in non-dating situations, which might not be optimal, considering age influences a lot about what we believe, and how we relate to others.

I would guess in most public locations, most people assume there are no humans with schizophrenia in most groups under a certain # of people, unless someone is behaving in a way that is recognizable to others as psychotic — which for me, especially in public, is infrequently even during psychosis. (I don’t recall a single time in public when I appeared obviously psychotic.)

(Not sure how well-calibrated the average person is with the prevalence of schizophrenia, which is about 0.9% in Canada.)

II.

My plight:

Option 1: Tell people there’s a 90% chance I have schizophrenia.
Result: …they believe there’s a 90% chance I have this condition that’s often misunderstood.

Option 2: Don’t tell people there’s a 90% chance I have schizophrenia.
Result: They believe there’s a far lower chance I have schizophrenia, a disabling condition.

Option 3: Consciously, tiresomely signal the milder, more well-received symptoms of schizophrenia in hopes that those who Already Somewhat Get It will cautiously observe, “Huh, that person has a higher than average chance of having schizophrenia” (...and they would not be mistaken for thinking this)!
Result: I’m perceived less incorrectly than the above two options, without immediate consequences, with the caveat being that I put in more effort on my part.

If their understanding of schizophrenia is the same as the fresh-out-of-residency psychiatrist I had conversations with in 2023, and there’s nothing prospectively job-related or relationship-related to me on the line, the answer is to obviously just tell them.

But if their understand of schizophrenia is similar to mine before I was told I have a 90% chance of having schizophrenia and decided to read more about it online, I start wondering if this will be worth it, because of all the strings attached to all the other beliefs they’ll have about me (and personally, I don’t want others to believe Mostly Bad things about me that aren’t even true).

III.

And yes, the thing that sucks is that this isn’t something I can escape without significant drawbacks. (…It’s not practical to declare, “I’m schizophrenic!” every time I’m around a new human, nor would that be without contributing toward them having false beliefs about me.)

It’s not something that momentarily is around me.

It comes along with me always unless I’m determined to make sure it doesn’t — like here.

(Sometimes, it feels like in a public setting, if I move 10m this direction, there becomes a new set of people who are afflicted with this false belief that nobody within 10m of them has schizophrenia.)

It becomes frustrating if you strive to be as honest as you can be without accruing fruitless punishments in your life; your invisible presence means those around you will be less calibrated with reality, and pretty much everyone around you will be wrong until you correct them about something that is central to who you are.

That was one of my hopes upon starting this blog — that at least here, there will be a far lower percentage of people WRONG ABOUT A MEANINGFUL PART OF MY IDENTITY.

I.

It would be socially unacceptable to ignore a friend who says, “I’m in an abusive relationship” or “I’m at risk for abusing others”.

But apparently, delusions? A symptom of the sufferer’s likely already substandard mental functioning that increases the risk of harm to both the sufferer, and to those around them? Well, from what I’ve seen in first-episode psychosis, the general consensus is: “Well, we should just ignore that — let it go observed, but untreated.”

(“I didn’t know they were psychotic delusions at the time! I thought they were just… false beliefs that weren’t indicative of psychosis.” Well, you might not know the psychiatric name for the condition, but you knew a problem out of the ordinary was going on with that person. And if you greet someone with silence when a problem arises, you have ignored this problem that they have.)

II.

I’m not saying it’s worth it to put time and effort into discussing with someone the validity of their delusions, but just responding to them in any way is helpful.

Here are some fairly commitment-less examples of what you can say if someone exhibits delusions around you:

• “What the heck is happening?”

• “Is everything alright?”

• “Are you being serious?”

• “This isn’t what you’re usually like.”

• “Your mental state concerns me.”

• “For real?”

Just one sentence like this lets the person know that…

1. you’re aware something different is going on (in case they don’t have insight — and if they are displaying overt symptoms for the first time, this is likely), and

2. that you will be there for them during their time of crisis.

Even a single response of “What the f***?” is so much more preferred over that dead silence that will continue to haunt us long after our psychosis has ended.

There is literally nothing more emotionally distancing than silence.

It might not be intentional emotional distancing (it could be fear that responding would result in the person continuing to send messages underlaid by delusions during their period of psychosis), but I will tell you that it is the same as ghosting.

If there is no reply, we will think that we’ve lost you, forever.

And yes, we do have the option once time goes on, once we understand more about ourselves of explaining something along the lines of, “I was in psychosis when I sent those messages during xyz time period. I think this will be less likely to happen again because I’m now on medication to treat my symptoms”.

That is, if we haven’t been muted online.

But honestly? Some of us may not feel comfortable opening up about our mental states regarding something so poorly understood, especially after we have been given the silence treatment for exhibiting symptoms in your presence. Some of us also may not be diagnosed until a long time in the future.

Some of us are waiting for you, the person who has remained non-disruptive during the social interaction the entire time, to make any indication at all that it’s okay for us to send one more message to you - that doing so would actually increase our chances of being accepted back.

In that time frame - and especially on our end, if we’re continuing to experience symptoms of something we don’t understand, or if we’re struggling to accept our new diagnosis - there’s a lot of room for growing distant.

III.

So what if you don’t respond?

It makes me think (1 +/ 2 being the possibilities I would prefer over 3 +/ 4):

1. You don’t realize that I and others are at higher risk for getting hurt during times I exhibit behaviours like these.

2. Even if you do care, you do not know how to effectively respond.

Bitterly though, I have also considered these possibilities:

3. You do not care if I get hurt, and/or

4. you do not care if other people in society get hurt.

After all, being violent during times of psychosis does not mean I don’t care if other people get hurt - it just means I am unable to control my actions even in ways that would benefit me (through not amassing all the emotional, and societal consequences from spreading recognizably false beliefs, and not engaging in delusion-powered behaviour that causes harm to others).

My psychosis can be treated with medication, yet I’m not sure even medication can change the latter two possibilities if they are true. Benevolence toward fellow humans, especially more vulnerable ones, is something I value, so it would be hard for me to form or maintain a friendship with someone who does not share this value.

I know I may seem less reliable after having gone through an episode of psychosis, but after being on medication for it (and having the risk be far lower), how reliable are those people covered by the first two possibilities in their usual states without even going through psychosis?

The answer seems to be, at least if we isolate this to refer to the situation of a friend going through psychosis, not enough.

Overall, giving someone the silence treatment for exhibiting psychotic behaviour indicates that someone isn’t aware how how cruel, and ableist ghosting someone for psychotic behaviour alone is.

(Maybe the ghosters believe that one psychotic episode, and the fear of future ones overrules any potential benefit to being in a friendship with that person.)

Bitterly, I also consider that maybe they don’t fear they’ll lose the relationship, because everybody will be ignoring the psychotic person during their episode, and there certainly can’t be any new people on the planet left for them to meet, especially now that they’ve suffered psychosis, and possibly have a new psychiatric disorder.

Hopefully, with much time and energy on my part, people can be taught to respond in ways that do not require much time and energy on their part, by saying at minimal something, to encourage the person who suffered psychosis to feel comfortable explaining what transpired once they have greater understanding of what they were going through.

I know it might feel like you have a lot put on you when you’re suddenly, unexpectedly witnessing someone go through disturbances in behaviour. The underlying assumption may be that this person expects a lot from you in that moment (e.g., by potentially reasoning with them in hopes that they’ll be convinced of your beliefs, and be in a calmer state of mind). But realize that at the end of the day, because we have gone through psychosis within your perception, it is possible that we end up being the ones ultimately spending more effort toward — as well as taking a deep dive by putting our trust in — maintaining the friendship with you.

That is, if we even wish to keep those friendships.

IV.

I think especially with the availability of Internet friendships, being ghosted is a pretty universal experience. I’m not sure how many people intuitively understand how much more hurtful it feels when others’ reasons for ghosting you are not out of differing interests and/or values and/or personality, but are intermingled with symptoms of your severe psychiatric disorder — whether either of you knew at the time that this was what you had or not.

The worst thing is knowing that you had previously trusted these people. I’ve been outright blocked for the sharing of delusions in first-episode psychosis by three different people who I had previously had been interested in furthering friendships with (and if including acquaintances who I wanted to foster friendships with, at least five people in total), across two social media platforms. And literally, each time of the five times, I thought I was being brave by doing the right thing by sharing these delusions — perceived during psychosis as valuable information, including providing advice that I believed would improve the long-term lives of the people I was contacting.

Having gone through psychosis involving delusions shatters not only the belief that your mind is incapable of believing in vastly different things from the majority in your social circles, but also the belief that a. People will recognize your good intentions as good intentions (and that you certainly won’t be punished for them), and b. People will treat you with the bare minimum of benevolence (including not giving you the silent treatment) if you exhibit behaviour caused by an undiagnosed psychiatric disorder, and c. People will intuitively try to help you, not leave you indefinitely, if you suffer from a severe psychiatric disorder.

Spending time and energy toward a friendship is not a problem to me if I value the person greatly… and if I don’t, then that person’s role in my life is probably easily replaceable, and I’ll have more social headspace for other ventures.

Past beliefs may have been only subconscious, and current beliefs have definitely been conscious (while writing this).

Here is some information that I didn’t know prior to experiencing psychosis that I think could be common misconceptions:

Past (false) belief: Hallucinations are a “requirement” for someone to be in psychosis.

Current belief: Schizophrenia is associated with myriad symptoms, of which hallucinations can be but do not have to be required for a diagnosis.

Some people experience psychosis without ever the most stereotypical symptoms of schizophrenia. I never experienced any form (visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile) of hallucination in first-episode psychosis, which lasted >=1017 days for me before it was identified by psychiatrists. After, I was involuntarily given antipsychotics, which subsided my symptoms.

Past (false) belief: Psychosis is black-and-white; all-or-nothing.

Current belief: Psychosis is a state that you slip into, with the onset being different from the peak.

Like how the sky must go through sunset while transitioning from day to night, psychosis is experienced not as a light switch flicking off, but as a descent in which symptoms are experienced more and more frequently. Likewise, one might experience being buzzed, and then tipsy, before being drunk. And one might experience being slightly more conscious after experiencing REM sleep, before being fully awake.

This is (somewhat arbitrarily) what the onset of first-episode psychosis was like for me:

Moreover, you can be at higher risk for a psychotic disorder than the general population, and never develop a psychotic episode. And being higher risk, like having a psychotic disorder, has implications on cognition – decreasing areas such as working memory, attention, coding, processing speed, and executive functioning relative to the general population, while still being higher than the schizophrenic population.

You can also be going through life as someone with your schizophrenic genes, also known as the prodromal phase, before developing first-episode psychosis.

Past (false) belief: Delusions do not feel enlightening.

Current belief: Delusions can feel like sudden wonderful realizations, revelations, or epiphanies.

They can feel like you are the one seeing the light. Having delusions feel like looking at photographs with not just the dates written on the backs of them, but paragraphs of text written explaining the meaning behind the images as well. Delusions can feel like complex storylines — based on things that can realistically happen, or have happened (e.g., things prior to your birth that you did not witness firsthand).

Delusions and the behaviour they incite may feel like more extreme versions of behaviour the individual already is known to exhibit. During FEP, I felt compelled to share the content of delusions with others, with the aim of sharing what I believe at the time to be valuable information to improve their lives and/or my life.

The specific delusions and their associated behaviour may vary based on one’s values, personality, interests, chronological life history / circumstances, and comorbid psychiatric conditions.

Past (false) belief: Delusions do not produce on average more powerful emotional experiences than regular beliefs in which you’re mistaken.

Current belief: Delusions IME do in fact behave like the above; they can be accompanied by VERY strong emotions, which could be part of what prompts urgent actions based on delusions.

There are emotions that I’ve only experienced during delusions — these being rage (which I thought was not necessary previously as a term; that anger was enough, for I had not experienced the intensity and directness that was rage before), and hatred. My delusions have also made me feel a shitton of other emotions, including surprised, devastated, shocked, angry, disgusted, fearful, frightened, joyful, hopeful, proud, and purposeful.

Episodes of psychosis can coincide alongside episodes of hypomania or mania.

Past (false) belief: Being psychotic means you care incapable of engaging in the act of planning for a future.

Current belief: Capacity for planning, being methodological, and being goal-oriented in hopes of / belief that there is a future with multiple possible outcomes does not contraindicate the presence of psychosis.

It is possible to thoroughly examine delusions, to recall various events in one’s life history, and to journal about one’s life, as well as to plan a trajectory ahead based on delusions, during psychosis.

When I am undergoing psychosis, my actions tend to be more haphazard; I’m more impulsive, and less inhibited. However, my behaviour is not inexplicable to myself: most actions (e.g., novel ways of arranging objects in a bedroom) are planned, and have continuity into time and space (e.g., if on vacation in a different country, similar behaviours continue happening there, and then, due to the self still holding certain beliefs).

Psychosis is not mutually exclusive with never being in a state of planning for months or years or even decades into the future. E.g., I prolifically made Google Documents meant to be shown to various persons several months later, decided on a career to pursue, applied to (and was accepted into) two schools — including the writing of a Special Considerations letter, and decided on a country to live in during first-episode psychosis.

Past (false) belief: The only difference between thoughts in psychosis, and thoughts outside psychosis, is that thoughts during psychosis are mostly false.

Current belief: If one is having delusions, one presumably does experience a higher frequency of false beliefs — however, one may not be having delusions all the time, and sometimes the difference, is that thoughts arrive with a different subjective quality.

Sometimes, thoughts feel more intense, muddled, hazier, denser, and/or foggier. Sometimes they feel urgent, scattered, and/or racing. It’s like the difference between writing something barely legible one busy morning, and writing in very standardized handwriting when you have more time that afternoon. If you change the font from Tahoma to Papyrus, the Papyrus thoughts would be neither more or less wrong.

Past (false) belief: People in psychosis exhibit signs that they are in psychosis 100% the time.

Current belief: Things done in psychosis look to varying degrees of “psychotic” — including not at all at times.

You aren’t exhibiting signs that indicate overt psychotically all the time to yourself, and those around you, while you’re in psychosis — only noticing signs a % of the time is enough to indicate psychosis.

There are symptoms an outside observer might not guess are happening based on an individual’s behaviour. I rarely experience word salad, and don’t always have difficult-to-comprehend i.e., impaired writing in psychosis. You can do normal activities like walk the dog during psychosis, and be completely unnoticed by strangers that you are currently psychotic.

Looking at photos of me taken by others when I was in psychosis, I don’t think there’s any way from looking at me to tell what I was experiencing. I don’t even think I had more impaired hygiene or self-care during psychosis; I had a harder time with it during spells of depression at ages 19-22 (inclusive) before psychosis. Some photography and videography that I took on my phone were the results of delusions I had, and I now interpret as signs of psychosis, however some photographs and videos are of phenomena I would take outside of psychosis.

Past (false) belief: You need to know a relative diagnosed with schizophrenia to develop psychosis.

Current belief: You do not need a relative diagnosed with schizophrenia to go through the prodromal phase and then develop psychosis.

It is not only schizophrenia (or schizoaffective disorder i.e., schizophrenia + mood disorder over a certain % of the time) that increases the risk of a relative having schizophrenia. They can be framed as belonging in the broader categories — “psychotic disorders” and “schizophrenia spectrum disorders”. Schizotypal personality disorder, schizoid personality disorder, schizophreniform disorder, are some examples of some schizophrenia spectrum disorders in which the sufferer carries genes with greater risk for schizophrenia than the general population.

Of course, what you know about your relatives is limited by their diagnostic opportunities — including their personal willingness to seek out diagnoses — as well as what enters your personal knowledge.

Past (false) belief: Only mania or depression can occur in episodes; psychosis cannot be episodic.

Current belief: Psychosis can occur in episodes, and schizophrenia is over 50% cases episodic.

When I first noticed changes going on in the way I interacted with the world in late 2020, I considered that I was was having an episode of something. I knew that Bipolar II involved episodes, and looked up criteria for the disorder, and then contemplated my chances of currently experiencing an episode of hypomania or mania. But I had believed schizophrenia was marked with few sudden behavioural changes, and was a continuous pattern of behaviour with an earlier age of onset than it actually has. I think knowing the likelihood of psychosis to occur in episodes would have helped me identify my episodes as psychotic (as well as occasionally manic or hypomanic): perhaps I would have looked up the criteria at age 22, as I did for Bipolar II then.

Past (false) belief: Schizophrenia is a lot more common than in males than females.

Current belief: In Canada in 2016-2017, of those diagnosed with schizophrenia, 56% were classified into men and were 44% were classified into women.

I.

…I wish for people to change many of their behaviours in response to those in psychosis.

But I’ll just complain about two things here.

Anecdotally, I recently discovered:

• a) a complaint on a forum about a minor thing that someone in psychosis did involving the complainer IRL as reason to fear them,

• b) a quote in which someone else cherry-picked someone in psychosis’ alarming action to tell an interviewer.

It doesn’t matter who, but someone on a forum that I do not wish to be named for privacy reasons, I wrote:

"I think my fear comes from a hospital stay a few years back when I was at a ward with people with all kinds of diagnoses and I shared room with a girl with schizophrenia. She accused me of using her toothbrush and talking about her behind her back with the other patients. It was not a fun experience, but I know most people with psychosis won't do things like that and won't scare me in any way."

I don’t think the intent was not good, but it did seem a little out-of-context to me, as it does not sound like that experience had a large impact on their stay in IP (and was not super relevant in the context of the forum). Compare that to losses of autonomy and physical mobility in an IP ward, and I wonder why the actions of one psychotic person within their overall experience as a patient in IP becomes worthy of telling others.

I think it’s generally not a good idea to mention someone else’s symptoms of mental illness, unless you wish to seek help for them in the process.

She focused on her own fear of people with schizophrenia, and what they could do to her, rather than anything else about the situation.

Fear is a valid feeling, but it is not always rational — one could be scared of a spider as they prepare to squish it, to painlessly for the killer, and with great certainty from the killer’s POV, end the source of the felt-as-scary spider’s life.

(Does the spider know this will happen? If they believe they will be squished, how do they feel before they are squished?)

Fear is also not free from discrimination.

Also, given that schizophrenics live shorter by >10 years than the average person, are less intelligent than average, are 80-90% unemployed, are surely less represented in positions of power… how much ought the non-schizophrenics, to fear us for rare times of sharing information that usually is obviously false, and how much ought we, the schizophrenics, to fear others in the times we encounter them, for far more common times of intolerance, as well as the sharing of specific incidents that we would probably prefer as confidential medical information?

I want to get more specific. Again, I don’t think OP means any harm, but I think even a simple, fairly innocuous remark shows misunderstanding of schizophrenia. Misunderstanding is common, and I chose this remark because I believe it’s said with benign intention, while still showing misunderstanding about the condition (which is something I’ve personally had a lot of prior to learning more in the year 2024). I didn’t want to bring up a remark which shows misunderstanding that’s more distressing for anyone to read.

I interpret referring to what was said as rumours to imply the person saying them was:

• A) intentionally trying to lower someone else’s reputation by saying things the rumour-starter knows to be false, OR

• B) carelessly, offhandedly, saying something (ie without consideration for another person’s wellbeing)

A) is not the case with delusions – the person believes them to be true, and may be saying them with the intent to help others (not necessarily the person who the delusion is about; it could be those around them, if they believe someone is at great risk of harming those around them), not with the intent to lower someone’s reputation.

Regarding B), people can be obsessive about delusions; they can think about them for hours, write about them in Google Documents, have very strong emotions when thinking about delusions, and especially when the delusions first arise; I would guess they are usually not said offhandedly, in way that some more innocuous regular rumours might be.

II.

Today I also read, from this website (that probably would fill you with dread if you’ve come across at least one page on it website before), that someone said about a stay of theirs in IP:

"The first night I was there, a girl who was schizophrenic started her mattress on fire and we were evacuated into a barbed-wire courtyard," Jeremy says. "It's kind of a lot of shit for an 18-year-old to experience."​

But could you imagine being the girl who is schizophrenic?

It might be rarer for people to have compassion toward her because of the deed she did. Society occasionally even encourages watching people from afar — as if they’re circus performers — with the anticipation of rewards for sharing unlikely stories. It is pretty socially acceptable to watch others do anything unusual, unrelatable, as if those people lack the ability to feel negatively to being gawked at, and to having their story be told later to strangers — or as if some people’s feelings don’t matter.

(If this event is "kind of a lot of shit for an 18-year-old to experience", then how does one even begin to describe how frightening it is for the person with schizophrenia who is probably a shorter distance away from the fire, and is watching their own hands perform the act of setting the mattress on fire?)

It is far more disturbing, more traumatic, to be the person committing the deeds they will regret later, than to be watching with relative psychological and physical safety from afar.

(When it comes to someone’s actions during psychosis, what you are watching, and then sharing frivolously with others, is often someone else’s traumatic experience.)

III.

These comments from people are not to me, unexpectedly irrational (perhaps ideally, they should be, though). They are POVs from people who have been — at least once in their lifetimes — impacted in a minor way by symptoms of other people's psychiatric disorders.

I have the assumption that it’s more commonly understood as lacking understanding for someone to remark on something that a person with a more common psychiatric disorder would do as a result of their disorder, eg a person with an eating disorder binge eating food, a depressed peer not attending class, or a peer with social anxiety missing a presentation in front of class.

It feels like describing all the negative ways people with schizophrenia have affected you is a standard, and ought to be the conversation about schizophrenia in most places on the Internet.

I ask for people to stop treating sufferers of psychosis as if their devastating psychiatric symptoms exist primarily as nuisances to others in society.

Please don’t make gossip, or a spectacle, or a standout story out of our symptoms, unless you truly mean to use that information to help someone out. Don’t cherry-pick our most shocking moments during psychosis to define us, and let strangers formulate first impressions of us based on those.

Just as one hopefully would for people with depression, anxiety, and people without psychiatric disorders, I think there is collective responsibility in treating sufferers of schizophrenia as more than just inconveniences or obstacles in society.

and a combined version of some things I’ve done in psychosis, which include a) making public PSAs in the discord servers and getting kicked out of two servers for the same delusion when I was trying to “spread awareness to rescue the child”, and b) wielding a hammer and attacking two doors of different rooms in my parents’ house (although I have never struck any windows, or entered any houses without permission) which caused now-easily visible damage to the doors, and c) an instance of non-lethal stabbing [I know that still sounds bad; and I don’t deny that it was; although it indeed was a case that left no permanent physical effects]). Although I have not personally experienced it, I have known secondhand instances of people in psychosis believing they are being poisoned, and making phone calls requesting to be taken to a hospital for their physical safety, or calling a poison control center.

Retrospectively, the taking a hammer and smashing GLASS (not door) part — which would have different consequences than smashing a door — is sensationalized.}

I.

The example I’ll use is not a delusion that I’ve personally experienced firsthand, but a scenario I came up with to explain something similar that I have been through. This is because I don’t currently wish to recall the specifics of my delusions, and tell them to strangers.

I believe it is possible for someone to have the specific delusion of believing that there is a fire in a room of the house next door, and that a baby is in it.

And let’s say, this person having the delusion is you.

II.

You are first met with the pesky thought, “It’s none of my business”, like an ordinary person when they witness something extraordinary occur that will primarily impact those around them, unless they choose to involve themselves.

But almost immediately after, you have a stronger thought: “Being a bystander to this would be horrible”. (You don’t lose your entire conscience once you enter psychosis). “Someone has to do something, and as hard as it is for me to act, I am in the best position to be this person”.

So at first, you feel extremely agitated.

You phone your neighbours five times, but nobody answers the phone.

You send text messages to your neighbours, asking where they are, telling them they left their baby in a room that’s on fire.

You even create PSAs in two Discord channels that you share with your neighbours, alerting acquaintances that there is a fire on xyz particular street in the city, in case someone in the servers is close by or knows of their whereabouts.

You realize you have to take more action – as scary as making that call is, you must phone the fire department.

After doing that, you worry that what you’re doing is still not enough (you can still worry during psychosis), so you individually text the friends of your neighbours, asking if they know where they are, explaining that there’s a fire in the next door house, and you’re pretty sure a baby is in it.

In anticipation, you wait a couple of minutes.

There are limited replies; nobody claims to know where the neighbours including the baby are.

You’re afraid the fire department will be too late - fear continues to motivate people to do a lot that they would never do in the absence of it - so you decide to try entering the neighbour’s house.

III.

You leave your own abode, walk to the driveway of your neighbour’s house, and try to enter through the front door, finding out that it’s locked. So you run back to your house, and find the first potentially glass-penetrating object you can think of: a hammer. You run back to your neighbour’s house, and smash the glass to their living room window while wielding the hammer (I don’t know if it’s actually physically possible to penetrate typical window glass this way, but’s beyond the point) to create an entry into the house.

Bear in mind, fast-paced, frightening events like these, with fears including fear for the life of the baby in the fire - that the fire department will be too late to rescue it - and fear for your own life upon entering the house with the fire, are stressful for the person in psychosis as well.

The sensory perception, including field of view, of the person engaging in these actions, does not merely encompass the watching of another - being a bystander to something that unfolds - but encompasses being the person involved in the movements: of seeing the hammer wielded in your own hand, and of feeling the window’s glass break under the impact of the own force you exerted.

You are not having a good time, but you are doing what you automatically believe you ought to do according to your values.

IV.

So you make your way: half-climbing, half-crawling through the broken glass of the window – feeling the physical sensations of the task just like any other task you would engage in outside of psychosis, because you are still a perceiving consciousness embedded in a physical form.

Some of the window edges tug your pants, some of it feels sharp - almost delightfully so - under your grasping palms.

By this time, you hear loud alarms blaring – you think, “Thank god, the fire department is here.”

Since you’re ahead of them, and on your way already, you rush up the stairs to the second floor.

You check all the rooms on the second floor.

V.

Surprised, you find there is no fire. There is not even a baby.

Confused, you immediately start thinking up all the possibilities: Is it possible you entered the wrong house? Did someone arrive here earlier than you did?

Just about this time, the phone rings.

You run downstairs – you recall seeing the phone on a desk on the first floor, on the way to the stairs – and pick it up.

It’s the fire department.

You recall, “Oh yeah, the fire department must be waiting outside.” So you rush to the front door, unlock it for them to enter.

VI.

They can also find no fire. Nor any baby.

I don’t know what the repercussions would be for dialing the fire department in no case of actual fire, so those consequences would factor into the fallout of a real scenario like this, but I imagine that at the very least, you would feel bad for involving them in a scenario where the result deemed their intervention unnecessary.

You feel that your actions are disappointing to them, and wish you hadn’t wasted the city’s resources.

The fire department leaves.

You check your phone – there are astounded replies from your neighbours, as well as from your neighbour’s friends. Your neighbour says their baby is with them; they had brought the baby to see its grandparents on the other side of the city.

Ten minutes later, your neighbours show up on their driveway.

You feel a deep sense of dread, as you realize they will see that the glass of one of their windows has been shattered.

You feel a sense of horror, knowing that you are the one who did it.

And yes, you are quickly realizing that there will be consequences.

Remember how many people are involved – not just the fire department, but your neighbours, and the friends of the neighbors you texted. Even onlookers in Discord channels you posted PSAs about there being a fire on xyz particular street are aware of the firm beliefs you had held, and witnessed the pacing of your relentless, disruptive actions.

VII.

Many will be horrified.

Many will be disappointed, at best.

Some may be shocked, if this is the very first time you have exhibited symptoms of psychosis – God forbid – in their presence.

Some people block your number – you will realize this only weeks later, when you have a reason to text someone who you had previously identified as a friend or acquaintance.

You’re thrown out of both Discord channels in which posted PSAs alerting “Burning house on xyz address, there is a baby on the second floor, anyone nearby?”, because you had spammed the general chats when trying to generate awareness.

Initially, your neighbours believe you broke into their house to rob their. (People can have their own false beliefs about the intentions of an individual in psychosis). Your neighbours call the police.

It is possible for police in my country to handcuff people regardless of whether have done something violent or not; I’ve heard them do so for simply because they believe a person is experiencing psychosis.

A police officer handcuffs you, and you are involuntarily admitted to an inpatient psychiatric ward, in which you are involuntarily given medication without even an explanation of its therapeutic and side effects from the nurses who offer it to you. This stay in the psychiatric facility turns out to be one month-long stay.

This is all against your will, but by now, you’ve contemplated enough about the impacts of your actions, to come to the conclusion, “What choice do I even deserve to have?”

VIII.

The fallout… it doesn’t end with the hospital stay.

People find it hard to trust you.

You find it hard to trust yourself.

You’re ashamed.

You feel profoundly hurt – you set into that house with the best of intentions, managed to live according to your values of doing everything you can to arrive to the help of others when you’re able to, and it backfired tremendously.

Suddenly, so many people you had surrounded yourself with seem not to want you around.

You feel unwanted.

Nobody comes to ask how you are doing since you were kicked from channels — nobody offers emotional support during your plight of being socially marginalized, not like you had at least tried to help another during your episode of psychosis.

Everything just feels wrong.

Is it surprising if this provokes anger?

(Or avoidance, alternately.)

All in all, not only are you still overwhelmed by the strength of the beliefs (now recognized as delusions) you had during psychosis, but you are devastated by the results of your actions.

You fear that this is what your life means for you from now onward.

.

Dreaming is a simulation for the intense and surprising times spent in psychosis.

I experienced no hallucinations in first-episode psychosis, though I did experience a sharp increase in the number of beliefs I later realized are false.

I believe experiencing dreams are a way for people who’ve never suffered from psychosis to come closer to understanding it; for they too have believed in a world where previously unimaginable things are now happening, often at a very fast pace, and yet everything “makes sense”… and in which one is at varying turns surprised, excited, agitated, upset, and later ashamed, embarrassed, and/or humiliated by the things they had once – so recently, too – involuntarily believed in.

There are very “outlandish” situations that exist out there, like political brainwashing in North Korea, so to believe in something imaginative does not in and of itself indicate one's belief is wrong.

During a dream, I do not always stop to consider the possibility that my beliefs about what is happening around me are false. Likewise, my shift into first-episode psychosis resulted in an interpretation of reality that I rarely felt needed further questioning than usual.

Things that would after waking up seem absurd may occur during dreams. And the events that happen in dreams felt as emotionally impactful by the haver of the dream — dreams can be sweet or nightmarish — and one acts accordingly with whatever situation that goes haywire, with an autopilot-like feeling. Likewise, in psychosis, one can feel pleasant or unpleasant emotions based on their interpretations of reality, and one is constantly adjusting their actions based on their frequently changing beliefs.