May 24th is World Schizophrenia (Awareness) Day
So here's some reminders. Feel free to add on with your own as well!
Psychosis does not make someone inherently dangerous. In fact, psychotic folks are more likely to be the victims of violent crime. Anyone can be dangerous, regardless of whether they have a psychotic disorder or not.
Psychosis doesn't mean your life is over. Psychosis affects quality of life in a lot of ways, but it's not hopeless! Plenty of people with schizophrenia manage to live a fulfilling life, even with the struggles that come with the disorder. There's ways to manage, there's ways to find support, and all psychotic people deserve help to get to the point where they're at their healthiest--their own definition of healthy, whatever that might look like for them. Healing looks different for everyone, remember that!
Schizophrenia (and other psychotic disorders) aren't always just delusions and hallucinations. There's other symptoms including flat affect (lack of emotional expression), catatonia (restriction or loss of movement), depression, isolation, anhedonia (inability to feel joy), disorganised thinking and speech (word salad, words lose meaning, etc), problems with your memory and attention, and more.
Hallucinations aren't always seeing and hearing things. You can experience visual hallucinations, auditory (hearing) hallucinations, tactile (touch), olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste), and really any sense your body has.
Hallucinations also aren't always horrifying. What I mean by that is it's not always ghosts and demons and blood and bodies, like in the movies. Sometimes it's a little beetle, or a cat. Sometimes it's hearing a friend's voice when they're not around, saying something mundane. Sometimes you hear your phone ring in another room. They can be mundane and annoying as well as something more stereotypical!
You can't "snap someone out" of a delusion. Belittling someone, telling them to get over themselves, that they're being silly/stupid, or things like "you don't really believe that, do you?" are generally not how you speak to someone in active delusion. This is more likely to push the person away from you. Delusions, even if the psychotic person knows they're delusions, are fixed beliefs that affect us and our reality as if they were real.
Different people have different opinions on reality checking. For some, being reality checked while in a delusion might help! For others, it will push them further into it and make getting out of the episode much harder. It's best to ask each individual psychotic person you know what they want you to do, if anything. You should never encourage (or affirm) a delusion or reality check a delusion without knowing what the person needs.
It's not always as simple as "take your meds". For some, medication can be lifechanging and make their symptoms few and far between! For others, they might still experience symptoms even if they're easier to manage while medicated. Others prefer to be unmediated, or need to be because of other medical complications. Psychotic people, regardless of if they're medicated or not, are worthy of support and care. Someone not taking medication doesn't mean they're "refusing to get better".