ECT treatment

that's a very good point.

One of the strategies we are taught to use is not to engage with the "voices", no bargaining and no debate, no reasoning and no fighting. Challenging can sometimes make things much worse.

Of course all is not as easy as it seems. When the "voices" are just out there and take over your consciousness, well there's no chance to do anything because you are then in an unreal world brought on by the psychosis.

I am not sure whether you could reason yourself out of a paranoid delusion or not.

My flatmate is a paranoid schizophrenic and there is no way you could reason him out of anything once he gets it into his head.

The nature of the paranoia is that you believe it no matter what, so its difficult to reason that it isn't.

For example I got it into my head early last year that there was a guy hiding in my garage. I rang the local cops who came down and showed me there was noone.

But I couldn't get it out of my head so I put a bolt on the door to the garage. Now the psych and everyone else could demonstrate to me it couldn't be but it didn't matter, I still believed it no matter what.

Even today I have some inkling that it could have been true. So you agree it couldn't be true to them but inside you think it might be.

The problem with paranoia is that it blurs the line between reality and unreality so you are never really sure if something happened or not. That's one difficulty in getting on with your life in a usual sort of way.

There are grounding techniques which help and my mates usually pull me up if they see me going off, so it can be manageable.

As I have said a lot before medication helps massively with this as does the support of your healthcare team.

Its not only lawyers.

I might be off track but I do know what you mean about people intellectually talking and hypothesising about people with mental health but not really understanding what it is all about.

It reminds me when I went for my job capacity test with centerlink hoping that they would pass me for some work. My assessor had no idea whatsoever about what you could and could not manage with shizoaffective or schizophrenia for that matter.

I got failed because of the outdated misconceptions about that particular MI.

Schizophrenia/schizoaffective gets talked about a lot but much of it is ill informed.

Most governments appoint a minister for mental health these days but I haven't seen anything come out of that initiative.

You know understanding MI is difficult without living it in some way, whether its a health professional or someone with an MI. So getting lawmakers and government policy makers to come up with meaningful and relevant laws is a big ask.

The reason MH is so ignored by government is because they stigmatise it and a lot of the time don't treat it as a legitimate illness or understand it.

I saw a government minister talking about suicide bombers on Q&A this week, where he described all of them as having a mental illness.

Whilst I was glad MI got a mention it seemed rather negative in that connotation.

Informed people understand that they are created by marginalisation, poverty, exclusion with warped interpretation of religious teaching.

My living arrangement just sort of happened. Mainly because we were both young and had relatively poor life skills, so we are a good support for one another.

I really don't have any family to speak of so the people I meet at my mental health clinic fill that void.

I don't really have any really close friends who don't have a MI but that suits me fine. The other acquaintances I have are very understanding, if somewhat bemused by my antics sometimes.

I couldn't really see myself living with a non MI person, it might be a bit more of a complicated and complex situation than most non MI people could endure I would think.