I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND MY MOTHER’S PSYCHOSIS UNTIL IT WAS TOO LATE. NOW, I FACE MY OWN MENTAL HEALTH STRUGGLES

No one ever explained my mother’s illness to me, and the trauma I experienced had lasting effects. I worry that young people nowadays face the same challenges

When I was 12, my mother cornered me in the bathroom of our suburban Vancouver home. “Your teeth are too yellow,” she said, handing me a can of Comet.

Though disappointed that little about me ever pleased my parent, I understood from past experience how to get through the current predicament. I sprinkled green powder on my toothbrush and did my best to not let any of it go down my throat while I scrubbed.

The things I didn’t do: report her to authorities; confide in a reliable adult; tell my school friends; cry. Perhaps my mother was right and my teeth were ugly. Or perhaps the shame I felt overshadowed the grievous nature of her request.

As my sole guardian, my mother was the most important person in my life. And under her roof, I played by her rules, no matter how bizarre, because losing her was unthinkable. I didn’t know she suffered from psychosis. I only knew that when she stared at me, her brown eyes near black and glittering with relentless intensity, what she saw didn’t meet her approval.

“an invasive apprehension moved into my nervous system. Just the tap of her heels on the kitchen linoleum sent my heart rate into rapid ascent” more

Hiding my psychosis for 10 years from the age of 12

Luke Watkin was in year eight at school and alone in a corridor when he first heard a strange noise.

“I heard what sounded like a train brake, followed by a metal on metal noise.

“It was just something completely out of the ordinary. It was a bit of a shock to the system, something I just couldn’t understand or really process.

“My experience at the time was quite terrifying.”

It was his first experience of the mental health condition, psychosis. Luke was 12 years old.
He said it went on from noises to hearing words, hearing his name, to eventually hearing whole sentences “of it almost trying to talk to me”.

The main symptoms of psychosis are hallucinations and delusions and it can be caused by a specific mental health condition, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or severe depression. more

Depression Can Make You Hear Voices

Many depressed people hide their psychosis from doctors

Many people think psychosis only strikes people with schizophrenia. In fact, about one in five people with severe depression also experience breaks with reality. You might hear a voice berating or taunting you, or believe you committed a crime that never occurred.

To diagnose major depression, a psychiatrist looks for at least five of these symptoms over two weeks or more: agitation or slow motor function, changes in appetite or weight, low mood, trouble concentrating, guilt, sleeping too little or too much, losing interest or pleasure in most activities, low energy, and thoughts of death or suicide. If you also have delusions or hallucinations, you will be diagnosed as having “depression with psychotic features.” more

Psychotic Depression

Psychotic depression is a subtype of major depression that occurs when a severe depressive illness includes some form of psychosis. The psychosis could be hallucinations (such as hearing a voice telling you that you are no good or worthless), delusions (such as, intense feelings of worthlessness, failure, or having committed a sin) or some other break with reality. Psychotic depression affects roughly one out of every four people admitted to the hospital for depression. more

What ‘Am I Crazy?’ Really Means

Have you found yourself typing “Am I crazy?” into Google or asking Siri? You probably got back a patchwork of results, from online “sanity tests” to mental health forums.

Fortunately, most people who do such searches aren’t actually going “crazy,” as in developing delusions, paranoia, or hallucinations, says Gerald Goodman, PhD, an emeritus professor of psychology at UCLA.

“Believing that you are going crazy is a good clue that you are sane,” he says.

When someone is developing a serious mental illness with psychosis, such as schizophrenia, they usually don’t know it. “Part of ‘crazy’ is getting away from reality,” Goodman says. more

People who hear voices in their head can also pick up on hidden speech

The secret to both might lie in how our brains experience the world
Serial killer David Berkowitz, also known as the “Son of Sam,” famously claimed that he heard voices in the form of a dog telling him to commit murder. But hearing voices isn’t necessarily a sign of psychosis. In fact, according to the authors of a recent study published in the journal Brain, enhanced attention-related nerual pathways might cause these illusory sounds. People hear them because their brains may be especially primed to pick up speech.

“It’s true that lots of people who hear voices have serious mental health issues,” Ben Alderson-Day, a psychological research at Durham University and lead author on the study told Popular Science. “But roughly 5 to 15 percent of the general population will have some experience of hearing unusual voices at some point in their lives. We think potentially up to one percent might have pretty frequent experiences and just don’t really tell anyone and get on with their everyday lives.” more

Nightmares in Patients With Psychosis: The Relation With Sleep, Psychotic, Affective, and Cognitive Symptoms

Objective:

To examine the prevalence of nightmares in people with psychosis and to describe the link between nightmares and sleep quality, psychotic, affective, and cognitive symptoms.

Conclusions:

Nightmares might be common in those with psychosis and are associated with increased day- and nighttime impairment. more

How I Learned To Control and Silence My Aggressive Voice

Where do the voices come from ?

Being a Voice Hearer, I read on the internet where other Voice Hearers say their voices come from. I talked to other Voice Hearers about what they currently believed about where their voice comes from . I was also told by my voice what it was and where it came from. This actually chopped and changed over the years. There were times when I believed what my voice was telling me and times when I didn’t believe it. Below is a summary of all the places my voice and some fellow Voice Hearers suggested to me voices come from. They vary from the scientific to the very outlandish. I listed them because it helped me get to it down on paper and be objective about it. more

Methamphetamine and Psychosis

Psychosis

Perhaps the most infamous effect of meth on long-term users, though severely understudied, is psychosis. Often called “tweaking,” there are many aspects of psychosis—a severe mental disorder in which people lose contact with reality, very similar to acute paranoid schzophrenia.

A psychosis is generally characterized by:

Strong delusions

strange beliefs about things that aren’t plausible
grandiosity
insects crawling under the skin

Extreme paranoia

feeling overly suspicious of people
feeling like other people are ‘out to get you’

Hallucinations

hearing voices
seeing things that aren’t there
talking to people who aren’t real

Obsessive-compulsive behavior

cleaning
peeking out the window
taking things apart and putting them back together

Often, the paranoia a user experiences becomes debilitating. Paranoia is a self-reinforcing loop of beliefs that escalates in a fearful emotional state. Meth can distort reality, altering belief systems, and lessens the ability to control emotions, making fear and anxiety prevalent. more