The most intangible feeling of mental disease is psychosis. For a study, researchers sought to provide the first co-written bottom-up evaluation of the lived experience of psychosis, in which experts by experience chose subjective topics that were then expanded by phenomenologically informed viewpoints. First-person stories from within and outside the medical sector were vetted and discussed in collaborative workshops including many people who have lived with psychosis as well as family members and caregivers from a global network of organizations. The content was enhanced with semantic analysis and distributed to all contributors via a cloud-based system. Loss of common sense, perplexity, and lack of immersion in the world with compromised vital contact with reality heightened salience and a feeling that something important is about to happen, perturbation of the sense of self, and the need to hide the tumultuous inner experiences were found to be characterized by core existential themes in the early stages of psychosis (i.e., premorbid and prodromal stages).
Some temporary alleviation was shown to be connected with the development of delusions, acute self-referentiality and penetrated self-world boundaries, chaotic internal noise, and collapse of the sense of self with a social retreat during the first episode stage. Grieving personal losses, feeling separated, and trying to accept the ongoing inner turbulence, the new self, the diagnosis, and an unclear future were core lived experiences of the later phases (i.e., relapsing and chronic). The positive and negative aspects of receiving psychiatric treatments, such as inpatient and outpatient care, social interventions, psychological treatments, and medications, were determined by the hope of achieving recovery, which was defined as an ongoing journey of reconstructing one’s sense of self and re-establishing lost bonds with others in order to achieve meaningful goals. Clinical practice, research, and teaching can all benefit from these discoveries. Psychosis is one of the most difficult and disturbing existential experiences, so disorientingly different from our normal patterns of existence and so mysteriously human.
Reference:onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.20959
