Thanks for writing this! It’s really helpful to have the basics of what the medical community knows.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to help in ways that respect neurodiversity. Psychosis and mania, like other mental conditions, aren’t just the result of some exogenous force—they’re the brain doing too little or too much of some particular things it was already doing.
So someone going through a psychotic episode might at times have delusions that seem to their friends to be genuinely poetic, insightful, and important, and this impression might be right. And yet, they’re still having trouble tracking what’s real and what’s just a thought they had, worse at caring for themselves, and really need to eat and get a good night’s sleep and friends to help them remember to do this.
Yes, I think that’s where some kind of an advance plan can be useful:
“When I start acting like X, I want you to take step Y” or
“When you act like X, I’m going to stop engaging with the conversation and start focusing on helping you get some rest, and we can write down where we were in the conversation and resume 48 hours later if you want.”
Thanks for writing this! It’s really helpful to have the basics of what the medical community knows.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to help in ways that respect neurodiversity. Psychosis and mania, like other mental conditions, aren’t just the result of some exogenous force—they’re the brain doing too little or too much of some particular things it was already doing.
So someone going through a psychotic episode might at times have delusions that seem to their friends to be genuinely poetic, insightful, and important, and this impression might be right. And yet, they’re still having trouble tracking what’s real and what’s just a thought they had, worse at caring for themselves, and really need to eat and get a good night’s sleep and friends to help them remember to do this.
Yes, I think that’s where some kind of an advance plan can be useful: “When I start acting like X, I want you to take step Y” or “When you act like X, I’m going to stop engaging with the conversation and start focusing on helping you get some rest, and we can write down where we were in the conversation and resume 48 hours later if you want.”