Each psychotic experience is unique and influenced by social context and personal history. Therefore, every patient should be taken seriously from his perspective: how he gradually loses touch with reality. Otherwise, any standardized treatment based on guidelines may be inappropriate: when the individual experiencing psychosis realizes that he cannot be respected as an independent individual, any treatment will be difficult to be effective for him.

This article will share how Germans understand mental illness and how professionals communicate mental health knowledge to the public.

Psychosis Is a Human Phenomenon

Unlike other creatures, humans need to constantly gain knowledge of themselves. In this process, we may doubt ourselves, even give up on ourselves, and then transcend ourselves or lose ourselves.

When we are lost for too long without support and understanding, we may stop expressing emotions or choose to endure them, which can turn into depression. Or if we bravely choose to keep fighting, we may become manic.

People who lose themselves may also lose the boundaries between themselves and others, which will lead to changes in the perception of objects and others in the environment, and their thinking will become illogical.

If such an experience persists for some time, it is called psychosis.

These so-called psychopaths are like aliens from another planet and no longer live in typical human ways.

Mental illness is a crisis and disorder that seriously affects all areas of our lives. Sometimes others cannot even notice any changes in us, but our inner selves are no longer the same.

When the main manifestation is a disturbance of mood, vitality, and various feelings of life, it is called Affective Psychosis.

When perception, thinking, and communication are primarily affected, it is called “schizophrenia or cognitive psychosis.”

In many cases, perception and mood are closely related. Every psychosis is different, just like every dream is different.

Schizophrenia affects the self in many ways, while affective psychosis mainly affects self-worth.

“Normal” and “Special” Are Fluid

The form, duration, and frequency of psychotic symptoms vary greatly from person to person and from stage to stage. No one is completely sick or healthy, and it is unimaginable to maintain a lasting stable mood, a certain vitality, and a consistent feeling about the same thing.

If possible, this is an annoyance. People long for sustained creativity, but sometimes experience unrealistic self-doubt.

The media and culture are creating an illusion: we want to stay young and energetic forever.

Once you truly connect with the people around you, you will discover many crises and unimaginable experiences. Therefore, there is no need to worry about changes in mood, perception, and thinking.

However, vigilance is needed when these changes exceed self-control and cause distress to the individual, family, and surrounding environment.

Our stress response depends not only on individuals but also on the cultural environment in which we live, a humanistic environment in which we live and are exposed for a long time.

Therefore, viewing psychosis narrowly as an abnormality, without formally thinking about how this process came to be, is of no use to the disease itself.

10 Topics for Understanding Mental Illness

There is currently no generally accepted explanation of psychosis. All explanations of psychosis attempt to uncover the causes of the disease. Even the bio-psycho-social medical model has limitations in explaining psychosis.

From the early psychodynamic explanation of “schizophrenic mother” to the current view that schizophrenia is a neurodevelopmental disorder.

All scientific explanations attempt to reduce complex processes to a single factor, which is not only ineffective but also causes a lot of harm.

Considering that people in different situations and cultural backgrounds may have psychotic symptoms, we hypothesize that psychotic symptoms are a process of emotional and thinking movement between people in real crises and their external selves.

Therefore, we should spend less energy exploring the causes of psychosis and more understanding the individual in each particular situation.

Every psychotic experience is unique

• Each psychotic symptom is different and seems to tell a unique story. It is possible to understand him only by exploring the social context in which he lives.
• A “diagnosis” is relevant only to professional discussions and does not bring new information to the individual patient. Don’t let “diagnosis” replace his basic human nature for the sake of treatment.

Psychotic experiences are innate

• Everyone can develop psychosis, depending on their sensitivity and stress levels. No one is completely protected. If we imagine the behavior of ourselves and our children in dreams, we are all “mentally ill” at that time.

Psychosis and dreams

• Psychosis has many similarities with dreaming, providing an outlet for unconscious material.
• Expectation and fear are closely related. Just as there is joy and fear in dreams, mental illness also has the duality of desire and fear.
• The biggest difference between the two is that dreams are protected by sleep, and there is nothing to protect you from “dreaming” in a waking state.

Childlike sensory experience

• Children aged two to three will regard themselves as the center of the world. We know that this is a normal process of children’s psychological development.
• But if an adult had such perceptions, we would think he was delusional. In fact, this return to the perceptual experience of childhood is also a process of adult psychological development.

Crisis and risk

• Mental illness often emerges at important stages in life, and crises are an inevitable part of life.
• When we strive to grow into better versions of ourselves, things such as separation from our family of origin, forming close relationships, the birth of a child, changing jobs, and other forms of separation and change.
• These test our inner security and prompt us to find a new self.
• Sensitive individuals may feel threatened and challenged by these separations, and avoiding these crises entirely, while potentially reducing risk, is not a goal of treatment.
• It is even more important to maintain a long-term therapeutic relationship with mentally ill individuals so that they can receive quick and effective intervention during a crisis.

Human conflict issues

• Inner conflicts occur more frequently in psychopathic individuals, and their confrontation with these conflicts may seem “strange.”
• Conflict issues mainly include: dependence on and distrust of others, inevitable loneliness, intimacy and distance, increasing confusion about the world, thinking about the end or transcendence of life, etc.
• They are often unable to adjust their concerns and expectations of others and have difficulty matching their self-image with the perspectives of others.
• Highly sensitive individuals have more difficulty handling these conflicts and often get into conflict with others.
• Rather than viewing these conflicts as symptoms of illness, it may be helpful for them to encourage them to connect with these fundamental conflict issues of human existence.

Innate differences

• Individuals with high levels of sensitivity are more likely to put themselves in crisis.
• From birth, each person exhibits different sensitivities. However, heredity is not a “given” and gene expression and activation depend on the environment and stress.
• Therefore, although mental illness is related to genetics, it is not a hereditary disease.

Two directions of susceptibility

• Individuals with schizophrenia are extremely susceptible and are easily activated by internal or external stimuli, and then they use unrealistic experiences to protect themselves.
• Integration of inner self-protection may be directed toward sight and hearing, and external stimuli, stress, or conflict may pass beyond the “normal” environment and reach the inner self directly and unsuspectingly.
• Therefore, when analyzing the source of anxiety stimuli in therapy, one should not limit this reaction to the inner self and avoid “psychologizing” everything but should focus on the real danger he feels.

The body is the mirror of the soul

• The body is involved in internal emotional processes in various ways, and when psychotic symptoms serve as external stimuli to arouse emotions, an individual’s heart rate, blood pressure, and brain metabolism will change.
• During a crisis, these bodily changes in turn make the individual more sensitive to stimuli, creating a cycle.
• Typically, these physical changes do not cause mental disorders, but individuals mobilize internal mechanisms to cope with these changes.
• While some medications can improve these physical reactions, these medications alone are not effective for psychiatric disorders.
• Therefore, considering psychosis as an organic disease is inappropriate and can even undermine the therapeutic relationship, even if these medications significantly alleviate their somatic reactions.

Activated response

• At present, the medical community agrees that psychosis is a mental disorder caused by multiple factors. However, the limitation of this view is that they always treat people as objects of response.
• Psychosis is not just an activation response to a certain factor, but more likely an expression of an activation response, a contradictory non-environmental self-struggle.
• Simply put, intrinsic activation responses caused by external stimuli do not cause disease; it is our response to these responses that may cause the expression of disease.