How can I recover from psychosis?

Hello Mark,

I have been suffering from psychosis episodes for the past two and a half years. I am not sure exactly how to cure this, and I haven't found anyone who has had good advice and experience with psychosis. Do you have any advice regarding recovering from psychosis?

This question was submitted by 'Seth'

Mark says...

Hi Seth and thank you for writing in.

I have little information from you. I don't know whether you are under the care of a psychiatrist, whether you've been taking meds or a depot injection or treatment of any kind. I hope you have good support in your life.

Unless psychosis is brought on by drug usage, then you will pretty much always find that there is a build-up of stress before the onset of a psychotic episode. Was that the case with you? Stress build-up often produces the exhausted collapse of depression in many people, but if you are somewhat susceptible to psychosis (which around 1% of people are), then chronically prolonged stress might produce an episode. So anything that you can do to lower stress in your life, both in the way you respond to stress and also in arranging your life in such a way that there is less stress in it, will help.

Also, the more insight you have, the better. It can be hard during the actual psychosis to have part of you be 'outside' of the delusion, but if you can get to that stage (partly by staying as calm as possible), then you begin to control it.

This is a big, big topic and I realize I'm only giving you a few ideas here. Getting better at spotting early signs of beginning to feel overwhelmed will help a lot because you can begin to take steps to calm everything down. The more activities you can do that help you focus outside of yourself, the better; because focussing inward too much can also cause us to lose touch with reality.

I hope my answer has been of some use to you. It's important that you, like anyone else, meet your basic needs (as recognized by Human Givens psychology) as much as possible, because when we fulfil what we need to be healthy in life, it becomes difficult to become ill - if that makes sense.

All the very best,

Mark