A State of "Muddled Mind": A Manifestation of Psychosis Self-Accepted as Abnormal
There are lots of altered states for each person's consciousness | ~1035 Words
{Disclaimer: I’m only describing my personal experiences. Maybe there is already a term for them. Maybe other people just call “muddled minded” confused, and “intensive thoughts” intrusive thoughts.}
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.
