[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.

[saltcured]

This is your personal experience, but I'll note there are others who do become irrational along with having altered perception. It's hard to give generalized descriptions.

So, rather than just having some false facts, they will make bizarre "inference" steps in thinking that can border on free-association. In the case of one of my relatives, this process would accompany something almost like amnesia. After a burst of this illogical reasoning that gets way out into the weeds for tens of minutes or hours, she would seem to lose track of it and "reset" in some way to start again.

Out of this recurrence, you could start to sense an overall theme that was evolving at a different time scale, beneath all the illogical tangents. Even through different phases of treatment and remission, those themes would resurface as a sort of barometer of her illness. There wasn't always as stark of a difference between normal days and psychotic break days.

[Modified3019]

I really appreciate your responses (and ones others have made elsewhere in this thread), they give much better insight into what someone is going through internally than the clinical definitions I see.