Faye 🫧

I've had psychotic episodes where I simply come across as depressed and a little confused. I've had them where I'm anxious and rocking and crying but I'm not loudly proclaiming my delusion.

I've had psychotic episodes where I thought my family was being stalked and I had to harm myself to appease the beings stalking us but nobody knew. My injuries were hidden and I simply stayed inside the house.

I've had voices make me feel terrible so I just cry and talk about what an awful person I am but that just looks like low self-esteem.

It can be right under your nose.

Bring them necessities like soap and clothing and good toothbrushes. After being forced into gowns for a while it's really nice to be able to wear something personal and comfy. It's also nice to take care of yourself when coming back to reality. When realizing you haven't washed in ages a good shower is beyond awesome

Bring things to distract them like books and magazines that suit their interests. Hospitals can be incredibly boring. They can also most certainly feel like jail. It's brutal sometimes. These places have the bare minimum and any little bit of this helps a lot

Visit to show moral support even when they can't communicate or keep their eyes open from sedation. Physical company helps a lot of the time

Accompany them for walks when permitted. Feeling the wind or seeing trees or stars after being unable to for a long time is priceless

Keep them company by calling them after visiting hours end

Gift them coffee or comfort food. They can be big sources of endorphins. Something yummy will always be yummy no matter how detached from the world you get... provided things like delusions don't get in the way

Remain calm if they lose their composure. It personally tended to help me ground myself or lessen the panic I was having. People who were reactionary to me in a negative way defeated the purpose of being around me at the time

Show good vibes. When living a mental nightmare this can help improve state of mind or even delusions and hallucinations. Like even a smile can help tons ngl

Keep patient and don't take things personally. I had my own mother and doctors yelling at me because I wasn't acting the way they liked and it made things so so much worse

Understand that someone unwell might have a long grueling road of recovery ahead of them. Best thing to do is accept them regardless of what occurs

Advocate for their personal needs such as dietary preferences

- you can know your friends love you, but not believe it.

- you can know nobody is spying on you, but not believe it.

- you can know you don’t have to be perfect, but not believe it.

- you can know your thoughts won’t affect reality, but not believe it.

i was wondering if you could explain double bookkeeping? and add some examples maybe?

my searches have come up very complicated.

i may be psychotic and i am trying to learn.

thank you in advance! (your blog is deeply appreciated)

Hi there! Double bookkeeping is when you hold two opposing things to be true at the same time, for psychosis we use it to talk about a specific type of insight that many people experience.

Insight is when you are aware on some level that your delusions might be the result of illness, and insight can exist at various levels and in various ways. Often there's an internal fight related to insight, so one day you might feel like "I think that my beliefs might not hold up with reality and that I might have a problem" and then another day maybe you think "oh no, I nearly fell for the conspiracy by thinking I was suffering with delusions". And there can be many in between states and more extreme states as well. It's not either or, it's a spectrum.

Double bookkeeping is when you at the same time do feel convinced of the delusional content, but you are also aware that you have a disorder that causes delusions and that your thoughts might be the result of that. Often this allows you to act in a way so as not to "arouse suspicion" about your delusions, bc you are still aware how it looks to people around you.

So you could say that you are keeping two "books" on reality at once, and they can't both be simultaneously true but you feel rather convinced that they are.

As an example I used to have a long-standing delusion that I somehow personally was the cause of the suffering experienced by living beings on this earth, it caused me a lot of guilt and self-hatred because I did believe it, but at the same time I didn't go ahead and "save the earth" by committing suicide, because I was aware that my beliefs didn't make sense in consensus reality and that if I was wrong, I would simply cause more suffering to my loved ones.

It's disorganizing phrases and sentences. Instead of saying "I lost my bag" you end up saying "I bag my lost".

It's saying something out loud and hearing it echo in your head, only to completely forget what you said, or why.

It's lacking words and the ability to organize them in a sentence so that they make sense.

It's thinking you wrote something only to find out you wrote something else.

It's suddenly losing track of what you were telling someone, or thinking.

It's unknowingly misreading words, somehow sensing the sentence doesn't make sense, reading it again and realizing you read half the word or a completely different word.

It's your mind going blank and feeling a need to stay still and stare at nothing in particular.

It's repeating words and phrases for no apparent reason.

It's having an insight or remembering something you want/have to do only to lose it within seconds.

It's not being able to tell if something actually happened or it was a dream.

It's not being able to tell if a memory was a dream, a made up story/memory, or an actual situation in which you were experiencing positive symptoms.