Solstice System

We're a schizophrenic system on medication, which almost completely stops a majority of our symptoms, especially the distressing ones. When we're off those meds, it's very clear that we're not with it. It's stressful and comes with insomnia and an inability to function on some levels. The major defining characteristics for us are hallucinations (of all kinds), delusions, becoming irrational in thinking (including paranoia), and hyperactivity - these can differ for other people but are common symptoms.

We can separate our other disorders from our psychosis due to its nature - unmedicated schizophrenia tends to be consistent in symptoms outside of psychotic episodes or the comedown from those (which tends to be a period in which symptoms lessen), but it can flare up with distress of any kind. Luckily we're on medication, so it's extremely easy to separate psychosis symptoms from symptoms caused by other things such as anxiety, C-PTSD, BPD, or DID. It's definitely harder without medication and we have been on it for so long I couldn't offer explanations on how to differentiate - my one suggestion would be seeing if your symptoms change at all during different situations - like if any hallucinations change depending on what causes the flare up or the distress.

Hallucinations can come in lots of forms and can effect all five of your senses. The most common and known are visual and auditory. Our auditory hallucinations are really hard to distinguish from alters speaking in co-con, however they are usually in the same voice and say similar things - a common thing for voices to say is to do with paranoia, i.e. telling you what to or what not to do for x reason. They can also be odd sounds or sometimes even sounds that might make sense. They tend to be hard to distinguish from real life which is a big indicator of psychosis. You CAN be aware of psychosis and hallucinations! It's just very common to be unable to distinguish it from reality, and that's a recurring sign for all symptoms like delusions, paranoia, and other hallucinations. Again you CAN be aware of these not being real, it's just very common not to be especially at first!

Hallucinations of all kinds can also occur during PTSD breakdowns and especially in flashbacks and this is pretty common! We get tactile hallucinations of hands in some flashbacks which is a good way for us to tell whether it's psychosis or not.

We tend to get really hyper when we're off our meds, and we can't think straight. Our brain just sort of works in its own way and it gets a bit irrational. Paranoia can flare up and we tend to do just,, really stupid things, and we have weird delusions (shoutout to the time we cried because we weren't a worm... yeahhh) and it's just generally odd. It's like a state of being high!

I'm gonna end this here because my head it getting a bit jumbled but if anyone has questions feel free to hit us up. Our schizophrenia set in alongside the break of our C-PTSD so we've been figuring things out and working with it for a while and we know quite a bit from specialists, experience, and research. I hope this was informational!