My book is about my experiences with psychosis and all the bullshit I’ve dealt with because of it. It’s also about just learning to heal. I think my story is an important one, for myself and others. Please reblog this link if you can. There is a $15 dollar ebook option for those who prefer ebooks or don’t have much money. You are also able to just contribute a few dollars if that’s all you can do. Support from the wonderful mental health community on tumblr, the one that I’ve been part of for so long, would mean the absolute world to me!
It will also include some of my art, some of which has been reblogged on here countless times.
The time has finally come. I’m now in the pre-order stage of my memoir. If you can contribute it would be the world to me. Please share this with everyone you know, and please, reblog. My story is important to me and I believe meaningful to many others. Thank you so much in advance!
schizoaffective disorder has been a wild fucking ride. I’ve seen/dealt with so much bullshit because of it. But for years I’ve been hallucinating my childhood cat every time I’m very upset or not doing well. And it’s the most beautiful calming thing in the world. And that’s not the only beautiful thing I’ve ever had happen to me because of schizoaffective disorder and some days I just need to remind myself of that.
Despite these wild times, I am still on track to publish my first book. It’s an incredible and difficult experience, writing about your own life, and remaining honest forces you to confront yourself on many levels.
Fuck fuck fuck. I’m so fucking manic. I didn’t realize how manic until just now. Okay so here’s what’s happened. Me and the boyfriend broke up. I swung into a full blown manic episode without realizing it. I’m spiraling. I met a guy last night at a bar. He was super hot. We connected. Lot of similar tastes. It was great. Well I got his number. Saw that we’ve already texted eachother previously. We’ll we ended up meeting again tonight. We went to a bar. I packed my spenanite bag. Well at the bar I did Molly. It didn’t kick in that much so on the way back. I took more. Well we got to his apartment and his roommate was smoking weed. So I smoked some of my weed. He also had a blunt that I hit a few times. Well now I’m really high and have my little “reality check” moments. What am I doing?
I’ve come to realize. I’m utterly alone. I have no one to fall back on when life gets hard. I only have myself to rely on. I’ve never had to do this before. And I’m envious of my family never having to experience this. Which is why it hurts me so much that they ignore me and exclude me. I’m doing everything by myself. I’m paying my own bills, working and making my own money. I have 20 days to find a place to live or I’m out on my ass. I’ve asked my family. We’ll, I asked my mom. It’s been over a week now. She’s ignored my call and texts. It just breaks my heart that she doesn’t care if I end up homeless. That hurts. None of her other kids would end up homeless. My mom takes them all in. But me? No. Nobody cares about me in that family. Besides my big sister but she has her own life going on. Hers is hectic too. I know she loves me though. She’s shown me time and again. But the rest of my family? No. None of them love me. No one will help me. I don’t know why. I don’t know what I did to not deserve their love. I used to stay alive just for them. Stop cutting, for them. I’ve now learned to live for myself. Because they don’t give a damn about me. It hurts. I cry about this alot.
I’ve just realized that I’m manic as fuck. The whole relationship with my ex was all part of my manic behavior. I didn’t even like him. I was pushing my feelings from my ex onto him. It wasn’t about him at all. In reality I didn’t like much about him at all. Then deciding to move in with him. Impulse move. I would never have made a decision like that if I was in a depressive episode. Like girl are you stupid?
I’ve come to realize that I was just rebounding to be honest. I’m still in love with my ex. He’s who I think about everyday. I listen to his music everyday just to hear his voice. It’s him that I want and this guy was just a distraction. I didn’t want him. The only thing about him that I found attractive was his tattoos and his dick to be honest. But my ex? Everything about him I love. He’s not my typical type. Not one tattoo, no facial or body hair. Emoish hair. He finally let me pierce his ears and nose so that made him a bit more my type. Now he’s wearing the earrings I bought him. I saw a pic on Instagram and he looked so fucking cute. Damn.. I really need to not date until I’m over him. Or else it’s bound to fail. I just wish he was ready for a relationship. I’d be with him in a heartbeat. Oh well. Right now I need to focus on me. Finding a place to live, working and making money. Building my savings back up. Paying my taxes. No time for boys. I don’t have time. I need to crack down or I could end up homeless or just fucked. It’s okay. I can do this. I. Am. Resilient. I always make it through the hard times when I swore I wouldn’t. I can do this.
He’s literally so fucking annoying to me now. I can’t stand him. After talking to my best friend last night. He helped me remember the exact reason I stopped talking to my boyfriend in the first place. So back in June. We were fucking. I told him that’s all it was. We weren’t dating. Well in turn, he decided he was gonna be a fucking prick the rest of the night and treat me like shit in front of his friends. We went to karaoke and I just sat by myself. Everyone was having fun while I was having a panic attack. He told me I can just leave. When he was the one who took me there. So my friend came and picked me up. Once I got in his car I started crying so hard. Well fast forward to a little more than a month ago. Before we got together. We started talking again. I have no memory of that night besides remembering that he was being a dick and I was secluding myself during karaoke. I didn’t remember why it all started. Well my best friend remembered because that night I was texting my best friend the entire time. Well my now ex, decided to use the fact that I don’t remember to his advantage and gaslighted the living fuck out of me. He convinced me that it was ME that was being a major bitch that day, which triggered his mental issues and made him be a dick to me. So yeah. It was my own fault for why he was being a dick. So I thought aw shit, I’ll give him another chance because I was being a bitch back then. If I remembered what really happened that night I would have never given him a second chance. Ever. So yeah. Manipulative much? So now, every time he does something wrong he manages to swing it around qnd makes himself the victim and I’m the villain. Even though he’s the one who fucked up. Like when he had me pack all my stuff, just to kick me out of his apartment. He said it was because “I’m hard to confront”. He blames me.
Leicester psychologists have, for the first time, created body-maps of the sensations which arise during hallucinations in people experiencing psychosis.
The study, published in The Lancet’s EClinicalMedicine, provides the most extensive descriptive data to date on the feelings which arise during hallucinations and where individuals reported sensations in the body. University of Leicester researchers also studied the emotions reported during hallucinations, with confusion, fear and frustration being the most common.
Although there was great variation in the localisation of feelings across participants, for each individual feelings were recurrently concentrated in particular body areas. Areas of concentration often held repeated sources of feelings like pain, heat, or tension.
Dr Katie Melvin, of the Department of Neuroscience, Psychology and Behaviour at the University of Leicester and corresponding author for the study, said: “During a systematic review of existing research, we found indicators of the contributions that multiple senses, emotions and feelings may make to hallucinations.
“We designed a study and developed the novel but simple multimodal unusual sensory experience (MUSE) map method to investigate these features further. MUSE maps involve documenting hallucinations in daily life and include body-mapping. The article shares new insights through body-maps and data on the immediate feeling of hallucinations.
“The range of feelings in the body and around the body (into peri-personal space) were particularly interesting. Participants often described that the method helped them share experiences that were difficult to put into words.
“The methods and outcomes of this study can contribute to advances on how we understand hallucinations and how we can support people who experience them. The next steps for this area of research will be further understanding the embodiment and feeling of hallucinations in different populations and developing interventions to support with this.”
Psychosis is a term which describes experiences where an individual may have difficulties in determining what is real and what is not real.
Research indicates psychosis is associated with experiencing trauma, adverse life events, and stress. People may be given a diagnosis such as schizophrenia. Experiences of perceiving or believing things which those around us do not can also occur in physical health conditions such as brain tumours or acute infections.
Psychosis can have serious adverse outcomes on individuals including distress, lack of sleep, social withdrawal, lack of motivation, difficulties in carrying out daily activities, experiences of discrimination and lost opportunities.
Participants in this study were asked by the research team to prospectively document the feeling and senses of hallucinations for one week prior to an interview.
Novel visual diary methods involving drawing, writing and body-mapping generated 42 MUSE maps, which set out the specific areas across the body – and beyond, in so-called peripersonal space – where participants experienced sensations during hallucinations.
The study found that hallucinations were characterised by numerous feelings arising at once, often including multisensory, emotional, and embodied features. Researchers suggest further uptake of visual, ecological and prospective methods may enhance understandings of lived experiences of hallucinations.
Sometimes, NTs are so infuriating. Like there’s really someone who wrote a play about (I’m quoting) “a high-functioning autistic person and a normal autistic person".
It’s the end of the world and they have to decide society’s fate, which means they will make decisions “neither Leftist or Rightist” and test them on a Schizophrenic person who “wants everything and nothing at the same time”.
I shit you not. That’s really the premise of this whole play. Also, of course, no neurodivergent/mentally ill person is either involved in the project or has a part in the play because, according to the theatre company, “autistic actors are tired playing only autistic parts”.
Dude, do you even know how many autistic characters are played by NTs? You’re really gonna pretend you’re being inclusive by notincluding us? They’re being like “Oh, autistic people always have to pretend to be NTs, NTs should pretend to be autistic sometimes in return!”. That’s not how you’re supposed to achieve acceptance, dude!
They only have a behavioral therapist onboard (and the writer/director used to work in the socio-medical field). And they’re really pretending that it’s accurate representation.
Also, they added that they used staging to accentuate the inherent childishness that autistic people can display, and that “we have so much to learn from autistic people, they’re soooo enlightening”. Fuck off.
I don’t want to weigh in on the schizophrenic representation, since I’m not, but given the facial expressions and everything, I’m guessing it’s just as bad…
Here’s the trailer. It’s in French and, despite pretending that they’re uber inclusive, they didn’t put any subtitles. But I think you can already see how fake and unappropriate it seems to be.
Also, what a shock, comments are disabled. I guess they didn’t want autistic people or schizophrenic people to weigh on the subject…
Here’s a really cool discord server i run, it’s open to anyone who experiences psychosis, we’ve got lots of cool stuff including channels for LGBTQ+ people, people of color, selfies, and food prep. We’re also working on our blog psychosis-spectrum.tumblr.com (Still in early stages of construction) and organizing a weekly online movie night (With frequent random movie sessions during the week).
Drink some water, take a deep breath, if you’ve been wearing a binder for more than eight hours, take it off. Stretch, take any medications you need to, have some food, correct your posture, go outside if you can. You’re going to get through this.
Because we are seen by so many people as ill because of our sexual orientation or gender identity, a lot of us are reluctant to come forward about mental illness… That’s contributed to a lot of shame around it.”
We need more competent providers so that queer and trans people seeking care receive the care they need and don’t have to play the part of educator to their health and social service providers!
Scientists are studying a connection between the parasite Toxoplasma gondii (one of our personal favorites!) and its effect on behavior, most specifically, how it seemingly makes rats less afraid of cats. This isn’t mind control—if when a rat sees a cat, it’s still going to run away in fear. But while rats typically avoid cat urine, those infected with toxoplasma gondii do not.
According to Ars Technica:
“When trying to explain how Toxo produces this effect, [researcher Ajai Vyas] initially focused on the obvious: the parasite’s presence in the brain. When Toxo infects, it barricades itself in thick-walled cysts to evade the immune system, and these cysts can remain for decades in a few sites, including the brain. If Toxo forms cysts in specific parts of the brain, it could do something there to affect behavior. But so far, different studies have found cysts in many different locations with no obvious pattern to their distribution, so it’s unclear if cyst location can influence behavior.”
Toxo, as the parasite is sometimes called, is not only interesting because of its curious influence on the predatory relationship between cats and rats, but also because it can infect many kinds of animals, including a third of humans worldwide. To the average person, Toxo is about as dangerous as the flu, but it is also associated with disorders like schizophrenia. However, scientists warn that these associations should be taken with a grain of salt. While connections between Toxo and behavior are present, researchers disagree on exactly what its effects are, on rats, cats, and humans alike.
“The reality is that human behavior and mental illness are complex, and many of the Toxo studies are not standardized and have yet to be replicated. Toxo certainly doesn’t make it easy to do this work—there’s no good way to detect Toxo cysts in a living person, and the studies rely on correlations with Toxo antibody levels. But antibodies are a crude measure that don’t tell you about a number of things that could affect behavior, such as when the infection occurred or which strain of the parasite you’re infected with.”
i feel like people are under the opinion that it’s ok to purposefully trigger a psychotic person IF. IF they’re a bad enough person. IF it’s funny enough. IF you’re friends with them. IF you’ve got a personal vendetta against them. IF they’re acting crazy. hell, even if they’re just existing or talking about their struggles in a public space. or even a fucking private one. which is so incredibly fucked up. your support for psychotic people should not be conditional.
literally, people only expect other psychotic people to stand up for psychotic people!!! they don’t expect anyone else to have our backs. so they see it as easy ableism to get away with bc they know they just have to find the right button to push before that psychotic person is unstable— which is why when psychotics say we need y’all on our side we mean it. we need y’all beside us
[ID: a screenshot of a comment here on Tumblr, made by the user @ratt–park. It reads “one time i commented on a post and said schizophrenia isn’t your punchline. and people assumed i was schizophrenic because only psychotic people will stick up for psychotic people, obviously!! and i got sooooo many replies of people saying they were stalking me or that they know what i’ve done etc. and like. why tf is that your first response. why. what possesses a person to do that shit”. /ID end]
