  |
|
|
|
A psychotic episode has come to imply many things in the public imagination. In reality it is quite a different thing. A psychotic person is not a violent psychopath. It is someone who is having trouble maintaining contact with reality. They are experiencing symptoms that distort their reality construction. Psychotic symptoms occur in a fairly wide variety of mental illnesses. You can have depression with psychotic features. You can become psychotic with extreme mania in bipolar affective disorder. You can take angel dust (PCP) or an overdose of amphetamines and experience psychotic symptoms. Any prolonged chronic substance abuse, such as bingeing on cocaine for a couple of weeks, can produce psychotic symptoms. In schizophrenia though, psychotic symptoms are often the symptoms that form the basis of the diagnosis.
Sensory information isn't processed correctly by the brain in psychosis. So you often notice that the individual is hallucinating, experiencing environmental information that just isn't there. In schizophrenia the most common hallucination is auditory, often voices that criticize and frighten the individual. To the individual they are very real sensory experiences, virtually impossible to ignore, but no one else hears them. You can have visual hallucinations in schizophrenia, and smell, taste or touch hallucinations but these are generally less common. Because of loose association by the mind in its disorganized state, people often come to have very strong delusions, beliefs about the nature of reality that nobody else has. For example, I loved the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons created by Bill Waterson for many years. I thought aliens from the future had created humanity in their image. That is a delusion. I knew "water was a strange substance" because I read that in a book on Mythology. With typical loose association of untreated schizophrenia, I thought I was the "water son." I was the water son of the aliens who were recreating their evolutionary history using a strongly water based organism, mammalian humans. Bill Waterson was therefore actually an alien from outer space who was writing Calvin and Hobbes just to make me laugh and help me survive the suffering I was going through in being transformed into an alien. I was the one who had been privileged to receive this information from the aliens and I was the only human the aliens were interested in. I created associations between symbols, words and ideas and then jumped to wild conclusions from those associations. Psychiatrists don't spend any time analyzing the content of delusions. There are some interesting patterns
The copyright of the article Psychosis and Schizophrenia in Schizophrenia is owned by Ian Chovil. Permission to republish Psychosis and Schizophrenia in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
|
|
|
|
