Sarah™

but in my experience 95% of my hallucinations are getting spooked by very clearly hearing someone knocking on my door or calling my name from another room or hearing footsteps walking behind me which are "just" my brain recreating the horror of an abusive childhood

(not trying to put you on blast specifically, you're just a good example to jump off of)

media and pop culture hypes up psychosis a lot as The Worst That Can Happen out of sanism, so even when you try and filter that cultural bias out you still assume it's based on something

when, no, psychosis is actually very simple: it's just hyperactive pattern matching. it's your brain's signal-to-noise ratio being off balance, it's seeing images in random static. it's not always this special uniquely big thing, it's in fact quite mundane a lot of the time.

no one is immune to psychosis, it's not purely the realm of the insane. anyone is one bad night of sleep or one bad case of food poisoning or one bad fever away from being just like me on my worst days.

I have difficulty managing the stresses of daily life without becoming overwhelmed and debilitated by anxiety. That is disabling. A drug that blunts my anxiety response is an adaptive tool I choose to use to manage my disability.

I don't have to use that tool. I didn't always use that tool. When I choose to forgo that tool or don't have access to it, I just Am More Anxious.

I also choose to wear eyeglasses to improve my eyesight. I could choose not to wear them, but then I wouldn't be able to see very well. It's okay not to see very well (plenty of people don't), but especially in a highly visually-oriented society, I would rather wear glasses and see things.