Pychosis

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I've recently just got out of a year long psychosis due to marijuana. I'm on abilify and the psychosis seems to be gone. Has anyone else experienced psychosis, specifically derealization?

I once had slight psychotic symptoms twice or three time in combination with a PTSD/DESNOS (disorder of extreme stress not otherwise stated).

But I'm a bit on the syndrom mix mainly between autism/learning disabilityies and propably bipolar and I touch the schizophrenic spectrum right on the edge with some schizotypal personality traits.

Autism, Bipolar and Schizophrenia is a bit one spectrum, but they are touching each other just slightly and not every autistic person has traits from the other disorders and vice versa.

I've never heard of weed causing psychosis. What happened, if you don't mind my asking? Also, did the doctor explain how pot could cause that? I don't smoke it but I'm curious because I've always believed it to be harmless.

I've experienced it. I thought my family was plotting to search my computer and figure out what I've been doing on here. I thought a doctor were helping my family.

I have a personality change but wasn't diagnosed with psychosis via a psychological evaluation. The doctor at the hospital diagnosed me with it.

Psychosis is the indirect reason why I have joined the WP Forum... it happened to me due to a period of huge stress and physical weakness... click on the web symbol in my profile for more details... happy to hear from you...

The good news is that psychosis can be completely cured. It reveals your weaknesses. Provided you accept to work on it you will be a better person than before.

Cheers

Thierry

In people with a genetic predisposition to psychotic disorders, any illicit drug, including marijuana, can spark the onset of the psychosis. These are often cases where, had the particular substance not be used, it is unknown whether the individual would have gone on to become psychotic later on down the road. But the drug combined with the genetics combined with the fact that drug use is particularly common in the late adolescent/early adulthood years (the peak time for psychosis development) all lead to the appearance of the psychotic disorder.

It depends on the genetics of the person smoking and also on the type of weed smoked, but there is a well-established link between pot and psychosis.

The pot-smoking community like to think that weed is harmless and so promote this idea to each other and to the wider community. People believe about it what they want to.

All I know is the devestating effects of it on two dear friends. One was given it to smoke by his parents at a young age and developed paranoid schizophrenia. He is still addicted and stuck in involuntary treatment and going nowhere. Another was a gorgeous, muscular, healthy and kind-hearted young man who turned into an emaciated wreck who couldn't even remember me six months later.

To quote Southpark's school counsellor "Drugs are bad, Mm'kay."

I have experienced psychosis due to manic and depressive episodes.

Thought disorder was the prevailing symptom.
One day I drove up to the beach for no particular reason and I had a moment where it felt unreal and that I was being visited by the ghosts of ancestors.
Another time I lost track of an entire day after experiencing the sensation that I understood more about the workings of the universe than the best quantum physicists. I tried explaining my theories to a friend over instant messaging. She saved the conversation and showed me later - it was absolute gibberish.
Another time I was convinced that I had done some very evil deeds, and the sensation of this was frightening, terrifying.
Another time I looked into the mirror and saw other people's faces over my own, convincing myself that the person I saw was the other half of my soul.
On my first hospitalisation I thought I was going into a Nazi concentration camp and that it was my duty to advocate for myself and the other 'prisoners'.

I have quite a few psychosis stories. For a brief time my psychiatrist thought I had Schizoaffective disorder, Bipolar type, but eventually we decided that the psychosis was part of mood episodes, and upheld the first diagnosis of Bipolar I, with psychotic features.

The line between mania and psychosis for me is sometimes blurred and sometimes sudden. The first manic episode I had, I became pretty paranoid and afraid to go outside during the day after a while, because I felt exposed and like I was being hunted. I would do everything at 2 in the morning. I started believing the authorities were after me because I'd discovered their cloning operations, and started spending all day hiding under the laundry in my closet, only coming out at night. Eventually it morphed into hallucinations - I was still managing to hold on to my part time job, because I was only working Saturdays at that time, but one day after work I got on the subway and all of the sudden I thought I could hear people's thoughts, and that everyone was thinking I should be dead.

I went home and was making plans to kill myself but there was a merciful moment of lucidity where I decided to go to emergency room of the local mental hospital.

They admitted me for 3 months, and while I was there, the psychosis calmed down and then the mania resurged and the psychosis suddenly came back - one day it occurred to me that I was supposed to die that day I took myself to the emergency room, and by thwarting Death's plans I had become dislodged from my predestined path, and was swinging wildly through the lives of everyone around me - and that everyone in the hospital was in danger because they were never supposed to have known me. I was frantic, and was trying to explain it to my doctor, drawing elaborate diagrams and everything. I thought that just by being around the people at the hospital, I was killing them. That was the most upsetting psychotic episode I've ever had.

I get psychosis in depressive episodes too - when I started university I was depressed and overwhelmed, and I started seeing this little boy hanging around me. He never said anything, but when I asked him his name he sent the symbol INRI to me telepathically, which was placed with Christ on the cross to mean Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. I was raised with Christianity but consider myself non-religious. But I took this information, and started calling the little boy Henry because it sounded like INRI to me. I thought he was an angel sent to protect me. He stayed around me for several months. He would come to class with me, sit in my living room chair while I tried to do homework (and my thinking was pretty scattered so I don't know how I passed first year) and I can even recall feeling the weight of him sitting in my lap sometimes. He was maybe 6 years old, black hair. Eventually my thinking started to clear once my doctor found the right medication, and Henry went away. Sometimes I actually miss him. He was a hallucination that actually comforted me rather than scared me. Psychosis isn't always scary.

I have so many stories, but those two are enough for now.

I have a few stories as well and I am schizoaffective along with being autistic and having severe anxiety problems.

This year I had a very scary psychotic break and they get worse each year under stress. With me, pills don't help nearly as much when there are stressors. But pills normally help me otherwise. Back to the story. I started having sleep problems. Both sleeping too much (most of the day) or having insomnia where I stayed up all night long. Actually right now I am having that same problem along with increasing stress and fear about the end of the year (not the end of the world on December 21..that ain't real). At first I didn't hear many voices but got convinced I was supposed to stop a toxic cloud from hitting a solar system far away from here. A year before that a solar flare hit another planet and a few years before that a comet hit. What is different on these planets is they are full of alien life (at least before they got destroyed). This is what the government and aliens told me in my head. The voices then became severe (as bad is I had it for many years). While in the beginning the government and aliens in my head was just inaudible thought insertion it grew into an audible voice along with someone new, the Random Phrase Guy. How I had to stop the solar system from being destroyed (like I said, not THIS solar system) is I had to release energy from my body by doing something awful, cutting myself at certain points. The voices became even more demanding. They wanted me to kill myself and do other awful things along with the bizarre (thankfully I didn't do much). I won't get into some of the things here. All I can say is that this got so bad that I had to be hospitalized for a week. I go to the short term stay hospital. In the hospital for a few days (the first half) I got even worse. The voices got into other people's conversations. I heard them talking about me. Wanting to kill me. Calling me names. Sometimes I had to ask in fear to these people and other times I was just too scared to even ask. What calms me down in the hospital no matter how bad I'm doing is talking to the other patients. For me its literally the only thing I can do so I won't get bored and get my mind off what's going on. It is very boring in the hospital without a computer to use (no Internet!! ! NOOOOOO!) no iPod, no nothing. I always looked forward to visiting hour. I slept many hours a day at the hospital. I mean I would sleep from 8pm-7am and then sleep between groups or talk to people. That is the only things I did.

Before in the past I had this mode...and sometimes I still do (something like transient psychosis that last minutes to hours) that I believe I am a bird and can fly. I can't even speak English during the time it comes out gibberish. The problem isn't its language problem, but its very dangerous. It thinks it can fly. And I have tried. One time my brother saved my life. One time my pool had no water in it. Its an inground pool with a 10 foot deep area. I went to the diving board started bouncing on it and then flapping my arms. As I was about to jump my brother ran out as fast as he can and pulled me from the pool.

Another time I was on the ride on lawnmower and started mowing the lawn (really, is that what you are supposed to do with a lawnmower????) and got commands from the aliens to go to the pool with the mower. It got louder and louder. It also felt like my body was physically controlled by them. I started driving toward the pool. I stopped and turned around right at the last second.

OK that is enough psychosis stories for now. That is just some of them.

There is apparently some link between a non-celiac gluten issue, schizophrenia and autism. This may be why the two get mixed up in diagnosis? I read several articles about it the other day. Have any of you tried a gluten free diet (in a serious way) to see if it helped?
I like history and I remember they used to call schizophrenia "bread madness" and they mentioned that in one of the articles.

All of this stuff feeds right back into one of my special interest subjects. I keep thinking I've probably come to the end of that information path and then new things come up.

psychosis is like when everyone in a room is in hysteria because of something real and your just stand there with no feeling, emotion, just blank faced

I think one time i entered psychosis over the summer, i started talking funny to people, like, artificial, saying things with the same motion you would like whistling, like the words came out, but, i was just saying them, not really connecting, just afraid to have people know what i was thinking because they were invading my mind or would scold me, idk, im over it now, sort of like experimenting with human speech to see if i'd get different reaction saying the same thing in a different tone or way, it was like barking words out of my mouth, and talking in circles and stuff, not really connecting with the people around me, i probably came off really weird

anyways, it was a very stressful time in my life, no insurance, no goals, no money, couldn't find a job, just a really crazy time that i'm glad is over, just really skeptical of people and things in general

I hope that helped, for if i could have had what had had happened then there have had things happen, if you talk like that, you may be in psychosis

Hello phyrehawke,

Very interesting comments on a possible correlation between gluten intolerance and psychosis! Please share the links!

In my case psychosis might have surfaced due to a rampant then blatant coeliac disease. Although I did absolutely respect the gluten free diet since the diagnosis in 1993 (first psychosis triggered by hemorroids operation in critical state after 20kg weight loss within five weeks) it did not prevent me of four psychosis relapses since then with a total illness period (mania-psychosis-depression) of 3.5 years. To be fair my job can be extremely stressful at times.

What I have heard once on TV is a theory that not wheat is the real problem, but the uniformity of wheat compared to the past. A guy mentioned that eating wheat would pump morphine into the head of gluten intolerant people. It could be true.

Having experienced both manic and psychotic states the way to calm down is different. Humility helps to reduce manic symptoms. Compassion helps to reduce psychotic symptoms. Psychosis reaction in the brain might be equivalent to stress reaction in the body. Stress = the brain stops working, all muscles are activated to fleet from wild animals or to follow the herd. Psychosis = the body stops working, all brain areas are activated to think faster, more intuitively, with more empathy, that explains the save the world attitudes. In my case little empathy in normal life but full connection in case of manic-psychotic episodes - until the crash of course. So morphin could be the go-go-go for the brain, restless and powerful until collapsing.

Right now I am working on a psychosis relapse prevention system (workflow with self-care template) after having successfully managed a last small crisis during the past weeks... without drugs....!

I am increasingly tempted to think that psychic illness like psychosis or aspergers is not a degeneration thing but instead a sign of human evolution to cope with environmental stress factors. So we have something to share with the rest of the world beyond our traumatic experiences once we can manage our state (see self-mastery Bipolar In Order for details).

P.S. : my own comments here will be posted on my web page. If anyone is interested by an anonymous contribution let me know!

I have psychotic depression, but I haven't had a psychotic episode since April. I'm on risperdal, and it's really helped me.

Psychotic depression? Do you mean psychosis followed by depression? Difficult to imagine psychosis and depression simultaneously.

There is a correlation, which is not quite the same as causation...not to mention not everyone reacts to drugs the same way, so not everyone has a bad reaction but it is possible for drugs to add to issues. My aunt who has some psychotic disorder uses cannabis to mellow it so she can function.....otherwise she has to take three pills and yeah she certainly seems more functional with the cannabis.

Also, no drug is totally harmless and risk free, however alcohol and cigarettes are proven to be more deadly than cannabis. Also if drugs in general are bad why do they use drugs to treat illnesses? Just throwing that out there, I mean medications are drugs and many have some pretty nasty side effects. And how do you know it was the cannabis in those cases? I mean at best it may have been a factor. But that's just what I learned in psychology class.