[throw4950sh06]

At the beginning, you know you're mad. I remember the first hour or so, I was thinking "no fucking way this is real". But it feels so real that you quickly stop believing anyone who says otherwise and you mark them as the enemies. Your head keeps inventing reasons why is it real and the voices keep explaining it - in some cases it's religious experiences, in my case it's hyper-advanced technology enabling telepathic communication.

I didn't think it's the Star Trek from movies, I just thought we somehow made it work in secret and now I'm on it too. Paranoid people aren't paranoid just so, they are paranoid because there is a brutal mismatch between their perception of reality and what people tell them.

At one point, in a different situation, I knew I'm in the middle of psychosis - and my voices told me all about super-agent-psychiatrists who are trying to help me by doing James Bond-style interventions. So yeah, you can simultaneously know you're right in the middle of it, and discuss the situation with your delusions, while thinking the delusions are real.

[bowsamic]

How do you know it isn't true? Philip K Dick came to believe in his psychosis visions (he believed he truly was in Rome in 60AD or so but was being fed a created world by the Romans). But he had good personal evidence for it that he couldn't deny even in a non-psychotic state. Do you have anything like that?

I guess a better way to phrase it is, do you have compelling evidence that your beliefs are true that you have to force yourself to ignore, or does it just seem like nonsense when you aren't in a psychotic state?

[kayodelycaon]

Not OP, my manic episodes come with extreme paranoia, and I have had two psychotic breaks during really bad ones. This may be a completely different experience. Apologies if I sound a bit flippant.

For myself, my brain always knows what reality is because all of my senses work. Delusions are clearly internal. My self-awareness is firmly in reality but all I can do is watch myself react as if the delusions are reality.

Many people can’t grasp this. Awareness and control are always linked. “Blind rage” is just that. Awareness is gone.

I hope no one else ever has to experience being powerless in their own body and screaming uselessly in their head to make it stop.

As horrifying as this sounds, these experiences don’t haunt me. I thought they were just burnout from stress and carried on like nothing happened afterwards.

“Normalization of deviance” doesn’t even begin to describe my life experience. Eventually, I was convinced by my doctor to see a psychiatrist for ADHD. It wasn’t until my third visit she realized I had severe, high-functioning bipolar. Once I got over a month of denial, it was “Okay. That does explain a lot.” XD

[throw4950sh06]

You're not suddenly irrational in a psychosis, you still have your logic working, just with crooked inputs. So it took me months to sort through some details and make sense of what actually happened and what didn't. There are some things I'm probably never going to be able to explain and I just have to leave it like that. But I don't believe any of my delusions happened, I just would like to know what happened.

All the voices, and the sense of urgency and danger go away immediately when you wake up after a dose of antipsychotic medication. Your first thoughts are that you lived through some weird things which are not happening at all anymore, and now there's a psychiatrist untying you from a hospital bed and handing you a cigarette, which puts stuff into context. You also probably feel the best you felt in weeks/months because it's your first night of sleep since forever.

I can easily imagine someone thinking "well, I had a psychosis, but there was shit going on". Fortunately that's not me.

[nathan_compton]

Just a general piece of advice: when a person is discussing their struggles with psychotic delusions, its kind of messed up to say "Yeah, but how do you know they aren't real?"