#psychosis
Text: psychosis doesn’t make you a bad person
A medical condition does not make you a bad person. Medical conditions are amoral states of being. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Text: psychotic people deserve to feel good about themselves
A lot of us struggle with self esteem issues, I believe some as a side effect from our illnesses but also from the stigma and mistreatment we face. We deserve to feel good about ourselves as much as anyone else, there is no reason we should not. We are not burdens and we are not lesser, psychotic people have equal worth to non-psychotics and we will always matter.
Respect! Schizophrenic! People! ✊✊✊✊✊✊✊✊✊✊
Text: don’t blame psychosis for acts of evil
Psychosis doesn’t make a person evil. There’s a reason it’s difficult to plead not guilt by reason of insanity. Evil does exist, and people should stop trying to pretend it doesn’t by blaming the nebulous specter of “mental health” whenever there’s a horrific crime committed.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
The only major crime committed by a psychotic person that I can think of in recent memory is the Colorado theater shooting. One crime, one mass shooting out of how many hundreds? That’s not statistically significant, that’s a blip on the radar.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
We are not made evil by our psychosis. Psychosis is not a character flaw. Psychotic people are not the stuff of horror movies.
Text: psychotic people deserve hope
Why don’t psychotic people have higher recovery rates? I want to know. Our recovery rates haven’t changed much since the late 1800s, and that really bothers me. Are treatments truly that ineffective? Why hasn’t more work gone into finding effective treatments for schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders (I think I know why)? Why is there no standardized therapy for psychosis yet? ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
These are all major issues. The lack of research into schizophrenia and psychosis is disturbing. We need research into more effective drugs, drugs that won’t sedate us out of life and cause neurological damage. We need therapy designed for us. We need hope. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Text: psychosis is not a punishment
Psychosis is not divine or karmic punishment. We did not sin and earn our suffering. Stop the victim blaming.
Text: five psychotic people agency in health care
Does anyone else feel like we are treated like children?
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I feel like for the first few years after my psychotic break, I was not given much agency in my treatment. The only people who respected me and my decisions were the first two therapists I had before leaving for medical leave. The doctors, nurse practitioners, and group therapists all handled me with kid gloves. I feel like I was not listened too, spoken over, and my experiences diminished. I couldn’t really talk about what was going on, and I couldn’t really grow. I felt silenced, especially with my third therapist. I also feel like this is not uncommon.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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My current therapist is the most brilliant mental health professional I have met, yet she grants me full agency. We have a relationship based on mutual respect. I can truly open up to her, because I am treated like a legal adult with things of value to say. I can ask her about professional things, since I am going into counseling. She even will talk to me about issues concerning racism, as she is African American and I am a White person who never had somebody to ask before. She has told me i can ask her about anything that is bothering me. I really feel like I can grow into the person I want to be with me current therapist, because she treats me like valuable human being worthy of equal respect. I didn’t get that from the old doctors and my third therapist.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
We can grow, and we can get better. But we need to be treated with respect and agency. We are adults, and we are people, and we deserve to be treated like it.
Text: psychotic people have the right to accommodations
Don’t be afraid to use your disability accommodations.
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Disabled people of all kinds can have trouble feeling as though they deserve their accommodations in work or school, a form of internalized ableism. Disabled people in the not-so-recent past fought long and hard for us to have the right to this help. Many people still treat us as though using accommodations is a form of cheating, failing, or taking the easy road. But that is far from the case, accommodations only slightly level the play field for disabled people with their abled counterparts—we’re still at a disadvantage, even with accommodations most of the time.
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It might seem harder to “justify” using accommodations at school or work now that we’re working from home, but as final approach for students, I encourage you not to think like this. We are all under a tremendous amount of stress, which is a major trigger for psychosis and many physical illnesses. Use your accommodations as much as you need, it is not cheating to use what you are legally and morally entitled to.
Ida B. Wells was a famous early African-American civil rights activist. We civil rights activists of the 21st century owe our movements to the legacy people like her, the leaders of Civil Rights and Suffrage movements that started these great pushes for social change.
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In addition to being a major fighter for racial justice, Wells was a suffragette. Suffrage rights are a psychosis issue, as many psychotic people lose their right to vote when placed under the legal guardianship of the courts. We are all one bad episode away from becoming disenfranchised.
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Wells was one of the founding members for the NAACP. Like People of Color in the 20th century, psychotic people need to band together now and develop a sense of cohesive identity to fight for our ultimate freedom. We cannot achieve anything significant acting as individual actors, but together we can have significant strength.
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Let us learn from the civil rights movements of the past and the great minds that fought in them.
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All information was taken from the Ida B Wells Wikipedia page.
Text: psychotic people are not an afterthought
We should be the priority sometimes!
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We are always the afterthought, it seems, if we’re given a thought at all. Well, I’m saying that needs to change. Psychotic people first! Psychotic people are going to come first in my clinical practice, being my sole patients in private practice, and will always come first in my activism. With so few voices prioritizing us, I will not tolerate anyone saying this narrow-minded or the like. If psychotic people start getting treated like depressed people are, then maybe we can talk. But while we are marginalized I am putting us first.
Text: psychotic people have a right to be angry at how they are treated
We have a right to our anger.
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We have been pushed to the edges of society.
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Silenced.
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Forced into poverty and left with housing and food insecurity and no way out.
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Completely othered by those around us.
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Left with little to no treatment option, often so other illnesses could get treated directly in our place.
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Within living memory, we were tortured and chained. Sometimes things like that still happen.
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Yeah, we have a right to be angry.
Text: psychotic people get the final say on psychosis issues
We get to decide what we want for our community, what acceptable language is, and what is and isn’t appropriate. Non-psychotic’s opinions do not count. Non-psychotic mental health professionals opinions have weight in things like hospitalization standards, but they do not get to speak over us in terms of issues like rights and appropriate language, #sorrynotsorry. We define our own experiences, not those who cannot ever know what it is like to have a psychotic disorder.
Text: psychotic people are human too
We aren’t monsters. We aren’t demons. We aren’t animals. We are people as much as anybody else.
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Reminder to those who don’t experience hallucinations/reality breaks:
Please tag your AI generated posts as unreality or the name of the generator you’re using. The distorted faces/backgrounds/objects can be fun to look at and joke on but they aren’t schizophrenia/psychosis friendly and can cause a major problem to anyone who is triggered by seeing things like that. Courtesy should be taken to make sure the people who want to see it can, and the ones who don’t won’t have to panic at a new AI trend making them have an episode.
As much as we all try to curate experiences, and sometimes tagging doesn’t work, it should be noted that, at least putting the tags there is a sign that you’ve thought about others potentially being put at risk for a reblog or post. It’s understood that sometimes it’s forgotten and that’s okay, but please respond and listen to others when they ask to tag AI generated posts and reblogs.
(Please spread this around, a new AI trend is going around and this could be the difference between someone just being set off for 30 mins, and being set off and accidentally put in the hospital.)
