Getting the Most out of Your Psychosis
The House of Forbidden Knowledge's Associate Professor of Applied Apotheosis and Parapsychological Trauma delivers a brief lecture to new students about to experience their first psychotic breaks.
First you have to be psychotic. Obtaining a psychosis isn’t difficult. You’ll hear a lot of things about trauma and genetic predispositions and stuff as a prerequisite, but let me assure you that anyone can have a psychotic break for free by going maybe four or five days without sleep or a few weeks of having their grasp of reality undermined by some intensive gaslighting from someone they trust.
Don’t get me wrong. Stress and trauma are great too. A setup where you must stay active and engaged and making decisions and taking actions but everything you do makes things more uncomfortable, painful, or stressful for yourself—this is also a winner. For many people, this is just going to work or school or trying to please a malignant narcissist parent or spouse or boss.
Do not obtain a malignant narcissist if you need a psychosis for this project unless you already have a solid scheme for getting rid of bodies. Going without sleep is reliable, probably quicker, less messy, and requires fewer materials. And it’s required by our school’s curriculum, as it turns out.
You’re supposed to learn to allow a portion of your brain to sleep at any given time in rotation, like a dolphin or a bird on a migration flight, but that’s just the endpoint we aim for. It takes a long time to learn to get it right. And getting it wrong provides so much fun.
But ridding the world of a malignant narcissist is a substantial public service. I’m afraid I might be changing my mind.
You know what? Do what you like. You do you.
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The basic root of psychosis is a disconnection from the general consensus interpretation of what’s real. I put it this way because, while I’m pretty sure there’s an objective reality that doesn’t care what anybody thinks, a lot of what people think of as psychotic behavior depends on you acting in ways counter to what most people would expect or find reasonable.
These evaluations include judgments concerning how you respond to events that happen to you, like excessive emotion, lack of emotion, or what most people would consider an inappropriate emotion. I think it’s a bit unfair to label someone mentally ill because they fail to meet the expectations of society, but this is a long-standing tradition in just about every society. I can’t think of an exception, but there might be.
How you respond to something that happens depends 100% on your personal history and everyone’s history is different. Why the hell would you expect that everyone’s responses should match up? But apparently whether your behavior is expected or rational by your society’s standards is legitimately part of determining whether someone is psychotic. Currently there’s no established set of guidelines for objectively evaluating whether any particular society’s expectations or standards of rationality are reasonable. Inconvenient, that.
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Hallucinations can also be common. We all have a lot of internal experiences that nearly count as hallucinations without any psychotic assistance. Many of us—but not all—have access to that “mind’s eye” projection screen for conscious imaginings. Many of us—but not all—hear our own voices or the voices of familiar others as narrators for what we experience, and most of us are subject to “earworm” musical invasions. Then there are dreams, some of which can be pretty vivid. It’s not a big stretch for any of those things to be part of your history of personal experiences that drive how you respond emotionally to events.
Hallucinations tend to show up around day four of no sleep. If you stay up long enough, you will start to dream while conscious. I state this as a fact, and you can count on it. Dream logic and real logic become a teeny bit interchangeable. This is where the real fun begins.
And once you no longer have any reason to distinguish a reality that you can’t control from internal events you can’t control, there’s no remaining imperative to keep straight what’s internally generated and what’s a manifestation of the physical world. This sets the stage for developing a whole suite of delusions.
A delusion is a pseudo-rational construct. Think of it as a stack of facts based on your internal experiences that don’t match up with those of most other people. That said, delusions don’t necessarily need to be built on dreams or imaginings or hallucinations or other private experiences. Sometimes the delusion comes first, and then your hallucinations and such retroactively backfill the missing elements that objective reality failed to supply.
Delusions and obsessions can get fixed the same way sensory memories get fixed if they’re accompanied by overwhelming emotion or trauma, somewhat related to the mechanism of PTSD. Once you have a good delusion, you will work overtime to try to support it with rationalizations.
Here’s another way to state it: delusions are beliefs that have no benefit of supporting evidence from objectively measured reality and are often fairly easy to disprove. We give them special consideration because they can be dangerous, leaving the holder of the delusion crippled when it’s time to evaluate the consequences of an action or the chances of certain things happening—good, bad or otherwise. Some delusions can be harmless, but some can fuck you right up.
This is another place that society steps in to complicate matters. Because the official definition of a delusion is given a pass if your easily disproved conclusions about how the world works or how the universe is going to respond to your actions is a widely held cultural or religious belief, ranging from “this wafer turns into the flesh of a dead avatar of a god when a priest puts it in my mouth”—which is pretty harmless despite the weird cannibalism thing—to “a benevolent supernatural entity takes care of good people and punishes the wicked”—which catastrophically undermines the need for social safety nets, encouraging people to kick the downtrodden as supposedly “cursed by God.” It also cripples the justice system, especially where it can be made to fail to apply to people who are wealthy or powerful enough to be basically untouchable.
“People have souls and nothing else does” grants the believers permission to dominate, exploit, and/or destroy anything but people—and paves the way to downgrade certain people to “soulless,” putting them at risk for the same treatment. There’s also a delusion about humanity being easily divisible into masculine and feminine sexes and genders with absolutely no edge cases, and that the feminine persons are less qualified to lead or make decisions and should basically be subservient. If these easily disproved delusions were held by individuals in societies where such beliefs were rare, the individuals in question would be isolated for treatment or ostracized to keep them from doing any real damage to anything anyone cares about. Unfortunately these delusions are extremely popular and routinely codified in the bodies of law and other social constructs of otherwise sensible nations.
Furthermore, it turns out you can’t make a big fuss about these things if you just want to get along.
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So let’s talk about this concept of society-endorsed delusions—the ones that psychologists have agreed that it’s fine to have because these shared beliefs link you to theoretically beneficial social structures of community and religion. The list I just provided is hardly complete, especially considering the elements that are specific to various cultures and regions, and a complete list would need constant updating if we could make one in the first place. But I think there were enough examples to let you know the kind of thing I’m talking about.
I’ll remind you that many delusions are pretty easy to disprove, yet members of your neighborhood—in your school, where you work, where you shop, where you eat—will surround you and claim that certain obvious falsehoods are facts in exactly the way grownups describe Santa Claus to children.
I think I used the term gaslighting earlier and it may have been unkind of me to assume you know what it means, but the upshot is that you can cause a person distress by claiming—maliciously or innocently, the results are the same—that something is the case when their own senses can contradict it, or maybe just a minimum of investigation and rationality will contradict it, and thereby put them in the position of potential conflict with you, where in order to preserve an important stabilizing relationship they will have to stop trusting their own senses and ability to reason and defer to yours.
Santa Claus is an excellent example. It’s a kind of inoculation, in a way, because we inflict it on children, sometimes with the deliberate aim of tricking them into obedience when they’re being difficult, but only temporarily. At some point we let them off the hook—except for the part where we expect them to believe that it’s acceptable to inflict the same bit of supposedly harmless cruelty on the next generation. The benefit—if it’s actually a benefit—is that we get them used to the idea of acting like something is true when they know that it isn’t. They will do it to not traumatize the younger children who haven’t caught on yet, and they’ll do it to stay in good favor with the older grownups who rely on the fiction to keep preschoolers and the elementary school set obedient under the watchful eyes of the fictional all-seeing Christmas spook.
Through this inoculation we teach them to construct their own justifications and rationalizations that allow the Santa Claus conspiracy to be true in a way, when you squint, if you try really hard—or at minimum we teach them to play along. These are valuable skills, so when they meet the goons with guns and badges and uniforms on the street who will tell them that their homeland—the one that barely tolerates most of them—is the greatest nation on earth despite all of the immediately visible evidence, they have better chances of making it back home without being abused or beaten or killed.
It’s good to know how to fake it to fit in, but it’s not good to risk starting to believe it. Because when what you know to be true is wrong, your world doesn’t behave the way you know that it ought to. The stress and confusion generated by that failure is what encourages the seed of psychosis to germinate.
The various “we will beat them into you” cultural and religious delusions are known causes of psychotic breaks in those of us who lack the practiced cynicism to defend ourselves and our worldviews from the constant onslaught of bullshit and nonsense. Then we get people who suffer all of the debilitating symptoms of a psychotic break except for the delusions and paranoias and hallucinations—but the issue isn’t that they’re somehow out of touch with reality and isolated within themselves because of it, but that they’re struggling to maintain a grip on reality in the face of the deluge of bullshit and isolated within themselves because of that.
The resulting list of symptoms can be identical to the list for a diagnosis of psychosis: anxious and/or depressed, inappropriate or inexplicable behaviors, belief in a version of reality different from everyone else’s, struggling with maintaining a work/school/hygiene routine of any kind, distrustful of anyone and everyone, emotionally out of whack, disrupted sleep, trouble communicating, trouble thinking clearly and logically. This is the sort of thing that can happen if you don’t share your family’s or community’s or religion’s or society’s delusions. A reality-based resistance psychosis.
Your government, your church, your company, your school, your family—just about any of your social structures can be the malignant narcissist with no cares for your well being or concerns for your existence beyond what services you provide for it, gaslighting you and pressing its delusions on you until you finally get your break. Your psychotic break.
Helpful hint to psychiatrists: if your patient shows all of the symptoms of psychosis except the delusions and hallucinations, odds are good they’re embedded in a psychotic social structure and they’re just trying to survive.
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The lovely knock-on effects of psychosis are the major drawbacks. Anxiety, of course, is the natural result of the frustration of every attempt you can make to exert some control over your life. Instead or at the same time you can have depression, which can have the exact same cause. For some folks, depression is exactly what you get when your body gets numb to the constant flood of adrenaline and/or other entirely circumstance-appropriate neurotransmitters. The world becomes a kind of hell, so you stop wanting to participate and fit in. Daily routines and things like personal hygiene stop mattering so much, relationships collapse, work and school fall by the wayside, along with the last scrap of ability to communicate with others coherently.
And then, finally, you are alone in your world, and with all of that free time and no obligations and no concern for consequences you can really choose your own path. Unless your delusions have you completely railroaded, that is.
Just don’t expect to spend that time sleeping. Sleep is for the weak. Lack of good sleep can induce psychosis and a good psychosis will keep you from sleeping more than an hour or two at a time. It’s just a step along the way to that compartmentalized snoozing we’re supposed to master. Lean into it. The only way is through.
Fully detached, you can now feel free to rewrite your view of the world in terms of any delusion or obsession or fear. Rational analysis is far too limiting. Any associative links between concepts or phenomena or even words—aesthetic or poetic or what have you—are just as valid as the mathematics of hard logic (or basic grammar) for mapping your new geography. It’s time to make sense of it all, but on your own terms, and utterly alone.
You will fall down a thousand times when your constructs fail to support your weight. But what can you do? Try, try again or collapse into a tight little ball and never uncurl when the last of your oomph is gone.
That’s the traditional psychosis endgame, anyway. But I think you can do better.
Don’t accept defeat.
You might be alone, but you aren’t alone in your aloneness, if you get what I’m saying, and it’s the isolation that does most of the post-psychotic-break damage. The world has ten billion people in it, give or take. Maybe you’re actually really special and worthy of persecution and maybe you’re not, but think of it this way: Even if you’re one in a million, then by sheer math there are around ten thousand people just like you. In the days of the Internet, it shouldn’t be too hard to find one or two. Find a reason to shower and even leave the house now and then.
The biggest benefit of psychosis comes from the freedom to question anything and everything you thought was true or real, even what’s presented to your own senses. Realistically—if I can use the word—we’ve always had this freedom, but it’s scary, and it’s a lot of work, and a lot of famous philosophers have already tried to do it and failed miserably. Or, rather, succeeded amazingly well at constructing frameworks built around their favorite obsessions or delusions, frequently religious or pseudo-spiritual, and none of which offer much in the way of lasting value beyond a few glittering gems here and there.
Often the stress-load of psychosis comes with enough toxic brain chemistry to prevent any functional level of focus or coherent thought, and that’s unfortunate. In this all-too-frequent scenario, there’s no way forward but the removal of (or from) the source of stress if possible and a bit of appropriate medication obtained with the supervision of someone who knows what they’re doing.
Here on campus we have an excellent team on staff prepared to assist you with biological and parabiological modifications, medicinal or otherwise, as necessary. The school takes its responsibilities to their contracted students very seriously and will often take drastic action to preserve and/or salvage their investments. They will even help induce and maintain a state of psychosis if they feel it will help the progress of your studies.
A psychotic mind is no blank slate, but it shares some of the characteristics. Functionally it’s more like bringing a tornado into your house to make a huge mess, which puts you in a position to evaluate everything in the aftermath to see whether it should be ejected as garbage or useless clutter, repaired, or replaced by something different.
This might even be the evolutionary function of a psychotic break—to serve the purpose of a destructive fit to destroy mental constructs that have revealed themselves to be untrustworthy or unsafe. This meshes well with the theory that most internal states classified as mental illnesses, especially the acute ones, are perfectly reasonable mental, emotional, behavioral, and physiological responses to enduring unendurable circumstances—or would be in more natural precivilization settings.
Except psychosis seems to make more sense as a post-civilization phenomenon. Most of the symptoms of psychosis only make sense from a cultural perspective—distrustful demeanor, poor maintenance of hygiene, inability to communicate clearly and rationally, situationally inappropriate emotional responses, poor work/school/relationship performance, bizarre theories of causality and associations, and, of course, the contested reality of personal experiences including responding to stimuli only they can sense. For a bit of perspective, this entire suite of symptoms could be exhibited to one degree or another by every housecat. Cats are only visitors to civilization—they aren’t participants—so we cut them far more slack.
In light of this, your psychosis is an excellent opportunity (especially now that your body and brain have given you no choice in the matter) to take a break from civilization and rebuild everything you want to keep from scratch—as long as you can keep in mind that your favorite delusions and strongly held beliefs are just as suspect as anything else you used to hold dear.
Why else would you bother having a psychotic break in the first place? They’re kind of terrible experiences, really. Unless you’re a housecat.