Hi @it_is_Cold
I frequently experience psychotic episodes and have so for many years. On many occasions they have been severe enough to land me in hospital but these days (touch wood) I am usually able to manage the situation without going through all that nasty and unnecessary stuff. It is not easy though.
IMO the whole diagnosis bit doesn't make a lot of sense but what you are saying about your own self diagnosis i.e. bi-polar with psychosis and being a bit "loopy" makes sense to me.
Going with that, and keeping in mind that we are all a bit different, if I was experiencing those sorts of symptoms I would almost certainly conclude that I was in what is called the prodromal or development stage of a psychotic episode. This is a warning to start shortening sail and battening down before the storm hits. If I do this soon enough and well enough the storm, more often than not will just pass over without doing any significant damage. For me and pretty much all psychotic people I have ever come across, these cyclic episodes can last for anything between a few days and months. My own cycles, which I test for and monitor as part of my mental health management plan, currently seem to be about 5- 6 weeks duration with a peak period of perhaps 2 or 3 days. But as I said it is different for everybody.
Getting help
I'm going to quote something that another senior member @afterhours said a couple of months ago. I have just made a couple of small grammatical changes. The reason for quoting someone else is first of all because I obviously agree and secondly, that I would probably get dissed by the administrators if I said something like this myself .
Anyway @afterhours more or less said :-
Throughout my life I have been disappointed with psychiatric treatments.
If one is lucky, it seems that medication will assist some people but it all seems rather ‘hit and miss’.
I suspect that there is too much labeling of sufferers when really very, very little is yet known about the human mind/psyche etc.
It can't be easy to be a mental health worker. We desperately need them to be patient, respectful, fair, intelligent and empathetic as they try to help us to unravel our problems. Their knowledge is far from complete but it’s all we’ve got at this stage in history.
I’m afraid “getting help” is often a matter of luck rather than good management and just a ‘good listener’ can often be the best support of all.
Back to me again - The basic help for mental health problems boils down to three things.
(1) Medication - which can if your lucky suppress the symptoms without too many side affects. I am told that lucky means for about 20% of people.
(2) Therapy of one sort or another is said to be at least as good as medication. It usually takes quite a lot of work and a fair bit of time but can significantly reduce or cure the underlying problem.
(3) A good, empathetic listener. Note that a bad unempathtic listener can be the partial or total cause of the problem. You may have to trade in some of your friends or your wife/husband on a new better, improved model.
Other things you can do to improve things are
- reduce stress - very important imo
- regular exercise
- adequate sleep
- sensible diet
- lay off the grog and the wacky weed etc
Now it took me a long time to figure this all out because the so called experts never told me about it and many probably didn't even know. I often tinker with my own mental health plan to try and improve it. The area I have made significant improvements to in recent years is part 3 - The good empathetic listener bit.
Good empathetic listeners can be very hard to find in a world dominated by sound bytes and cell phones. So called mental health professionals are no exception. The most common complaint I hear from fellow mental health sufferers is that their psychiatrist, psychologist, therapist support worker etc doesn't listen to what they say.
Is getting your mental health act together worth the effort?
If you have a look at some of the horror stories on this forum about people who have fallen into the clutches of the public mental health system, I would say decidedly yes.
