As a function of the mood disorder I have, I sometimes experience psychosis. After working with it for a couple years now, I am very aware of when I am experiencing psychosis. This awareness is called “insight” in the world of treatment, which is a cool name, kinda makes me feel like a wizard. The first thing I do when I know I’m experiencing psychosis is find something to focus my eyes on. This makes it easier to sit back and think without getting distracted by what’s going on around me. Then, I try and examine my mood leading up to my experience of psychosis. Oftentimes I find I was anxious or overwhelmed beforehand, and the psychosis I am experiencing is one way I have of understanding that. Much like crying is not a symptom of sadness, but a response to it that helps your body relieve stress, psychosis for me is not a problem in itself. Rather, it is a natural bodily response to powerful and difficult emotions. With an awareness of my emotions leading up to experiencing psychosis, I can understand and act on what my psychosis is telling me. I can feel better after my delusions and hallucinations than I did before.

            My relationship with psychosis did not start out this peaceful. I was raised to believe psychosis was an invasion, a possession, that it indicated something deeply wrong with a person – a lack of individuality that stripped them of personhood. Under systems that exploit us by convincing us that community and mutual aid are weaknesses and individuality is strength, a community that cannot be physically separated is despicable. And so, this community must be made disease. The psychotic mind must be more than different, it must be sick and dangerous. I firmly believe that the impairment of psychosis has been constructed under the social model of disability. And we only need to look to indigenous and non-Western communal societies to see what we have lost. People who have what we would call schizophrenia under Western medicine are treasured amongst indigenous people for their spiritual knowledge and ability to communicate with ancestors. Even when studied through a Western lens, people in Africa and India report fewer negative experiences of psychosis when living in communal societies.

            Even for myself, it can feel very hard, and even wrong to imagine a world without psychosis as sickness. But it is worthwhile. It is not always pleasant when I have psychotic episodes now, but when I compare them to the numbing terror and shame I used to experience with my psychosis I am astonished at how even the small changes I have been able to make in my own understanding of myself have made me happier and healthier. I have created lines of inter/intrapersonal communication with myself that not only gave me peace in my relation to psychosis but helped me understand other parts of my life as well. And this is only a fraction of the destigmatization and community building we can create by learning from indigenous and pre-colonial health practices. I do not imagine a world where psychosis is painless, but I do imagine one where that pain is not magnified thousands of times by the stigma and hatred of psychotic understandings of the world that have developed under our current systems of Western psychology.  

This is a very complex topic full of many diverse narratives, but I hope that even this brief discussion of my narrative gives some new insight into the relationship between psychosis and the social model of disability. It breaks my heart to think of the joy and peace that people have been deprived of through the stigmatization of psychosis and how much personhood is stripped from people who experience psychosis. While the radical changes I envision may not be possible for people to carry out in the present, I hope people are able to look again at their biases against psychosis and find a place to respect the knowledge and insight that people with psychosis have about themselves and the world around them.