as small as a world and as large as alone, lichgem: youneedacat: scumtrout: ...

4:13am May 1, 2014

youneedacat:

scumtrout:

gothichunny:

i just see so many posts on tumblr about depression + anxiety but never anything about psychosis or illnesses on the schizophrenia spectrum and it’s like? obvious why that is the case. the stigma against depressed people can’t compare to the Hatred sane people feel for mentally ill people who behave in a way they deem unsafe or erratic or violent or, as they love to call it: crazy

As someone who lives with depression and has gone through psychotic symptoms, I think it’s a double-edged sword. Depression is relatively less stigmatized because it’s generally seen as not being ‘that bad’; it’s perceived as being Mental Illness Lite, something that you can fix with CBT and some Prozac. I think depression is seen as being more acceptable because a lot of people don’t realize how bad it can get.

And it rarely seems to occur to people that depression can come with psychotic symptoms. I’ve seen very few people write about things such as such as dissociation, delusions, or hallucinations while discussing their depression.

I once read a book by a woman with psychotic depression, and have never ever ever ever ever been able to find it again, even when I came back to the same library years later. But other than that, I have never found any writing on it pretty much anywhere. FWIW, the book was mostly about her stay in two different institutions, one of which she called “the bad hospital” and one of which she called “the good hospital” (but I’m not sure if it was good other than by comparison to the really crappy place she ended up in at first). I think she went through ECT at one point. And that’s all I remember, and I’ve combed tons of libraries and looked all over the place and never been able to find the book anywhere ever again, nor remember its name nor the author. I think it was written sometime between the fifties and the seventies.

Is dissociation considered a psychotic thing? I thought it was one of those sort of nowhere-land sort of things that isn’t really considered quite psychotic but not normal either.

I’ve experienced very severe depression, but I don’t think I’ve ever experienced delusions or hallucinations as a part of it, unless you count the idea that I was literally the worst person in the world who must have done something horribly horribly wrong in a way that set me apart from the rest of humanity. And I’m not sure if that’s a delusion or just a depressive thought.

I think I’ve only had true hallucinations or delusions during delirium or seizures (or on drugs), so I’m not too qualified to talk about that experience in terms of psychosis, but I never hear anyone talking about delirium. In fact one reason I felt so cut off from humanity after a solid month of delirium was because I could find nobody who shared that experience and was willing to talk about it. I’m still not even willing to talk about some parts of it because of the stigma around such things — and I mean like… I know delirium is considered ‘better’ than psychosis on the hierarchy of things because it’s ‘at least a physical cause and it goes away usually’, but auditory hallucinations and delusions of persecution still aren’t something I ever feel comfortable discussing, especially with my psych history (including a period where I was misdiagnosed and claimed to have hallucinations and delusions I didn’t actually have, because nobody in the psych system was giving me the option of not having them, and… complicated stuff is complicated).

Anyway, my delirium experience left me feeling utterly and completely alienated from pretty much everyone I interacted with for a really long time. I looked through the delirium tag on tumblr and there was literally nothing about delirium on the delirium tag. And I know I can’t be the only person who returned from a delirium experience shaken to the core like that.

I imagine that psychosis can do something similar. I mean there’s definitely areas of difference from delirium — including that, usually, psychotic people’s brains are functioning better in some ways, which actually makes the delusions a lot harder to get rid of. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the week at which my delusions and hallucinations most closely resembled schizophrenia was the point when I was starting to get healthier. Before that, my brain couldn’t form the kind of thoughts necessary to have those experiences.) But I have a strong feeling that the sense of being in an other-world from everyone else on the planet, or having been in an other-world and still having a foot in that other-world, is just as intense even if the specifics and mechanics of the experience are different.

And then the not being able to talk about it to anyone just cements that and makes it even worse.

Also I’ve noticed that it’s somehow considered okay, somewhat, to have hallucinations in the context of flashbacks — in certain really specific ways, anyway — with PTSD, in a way that it’s not okay to have just straight ‘psychotic’ hallucinations, and I’m not sure what’s up with that.

But that cuts both ways, too. I remember being told I didn’t qualify for mental health housing because PTSD wasn’t a severe mental illness. In retrospect I’m highly grateful, because the mental health housing was basically a community-based institution in disguise, but it’s very weird to me that PTSD isn’t considered a severe mental illness and bipolar and schizophrenia are. I’d honestly think severity was an individual thing, not a quality of a specific condition. There’s people totally incapacitated by PTSD their entire lives, and people who have one mild episode of schizophrenia and never again in their life.

(Disclaimer here that I don’t even agree with the current classification system for psych conditions, I’m just using the words because it’s easier than not using them.)

I’m sorry I wasn’t responding to you during this part of your life. I think my reasons at the time mostly had to do with concentration and attention span issues. I’m usually able to follow your posts very well, for being long posts. I didn’t realize how important it was until you said something later about how it made you feel that people responded less to those posts than your other ones. I’m listening now, though, and my attention span is functioning.

I think in psychiatric and medical circles a lot of trauma issues have been “softened” because of the amount, and type, of attention those things have gotten over the years, starting with psychoanalysis. I think people think that because they’re a result of life events that, to an extent, they’re more “human” and “natural” than other mental illnesses, because on some level people acknowledge that traumatic events can happen to anyone. Whereas people who are bipolar or schizophrenic are more popularly believed to have been born “wrong.”

Also, when you mentioned that nobody else was talking about their experiences with delirium, it reminded me of when I used to hang out in Nami-supported forums for schizophrenic people. I asked about hallucinations: Can you feel them? How real are they? Because I believed that someday I would experience them, myself, and I wanted to be prepared. And nobody answered. It was a fairly active forum, too. I think they didn’t answer because it was a scary topic.

That’s really weird, given that life events are supposed to have some influence on psychosis as well, but yeah it’s not about reality it’s about what people assume reality to be.

(BTW, does psychosis generally work like delirium did for me, where the delusions are like a taproot into your worst fears? My friend said she never realized how much my bullies were getting to me until she saw the delusions and hallucinations I was having towards the midpoint in my delirium when things were starting to get better. I mean I guess it probably depends on the psychosis, since psychosis seems to be a catch-all term for everything from early-onset confusion and language problems, to paranoia and hallucinations.)

And I don’t fault you for not knowing. Like… I couldn’t even express, myself, at the time, what was going wrong. Except by writing weird poetic stuff occasionally, which was hardly a very comprehensible way to communicate. So I can’t really expect anyone to have known the effect it was having on me. I didn’t even realize how profoundly I was affected until I started getting better, and then it was like “holy shit”.

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