Psychosis generally involves delusions and hallucinations. For example: hearing things that aren't real, believing governments or other powerful entities are specifically targeting and watching you (much more so than just being caught up in the standard dragnet surveillance), thinking you're a divine being or on a divinely-mandated mission, frequently thinking people you see IRL are stalking and following you, thinking some external entity or machine is inserting invasive thoughts into your head via photons.
And as the other commenter said, psychopathy and psychosis are unrelated, and as far as I know not even correlated. But I understand you're probably just referencing that story as an example and weren't suggesting a connection. (The context, for anyone unaware: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscien...)
Anyway; psychosis is more of a symptom. Psychopathy, itself, is kind of a category of disorders; where psychosis is a common symptom.
> believing governments or other powerful entities are specifically targeting and watching you
Because that never happens?
> frequently thinking people you see IRL are stalking and following you
Because that never happens?
> hearing things that aren't real
Who decides what's real? Is it not real unless you've got audio?
> thinking you're a divine being or on a divinely-mandated mission
> thinking some external entity or machine is inserting invasive thoughts into your head via photons
That's why I listed a myriad of symptoms. If someone solely believes that, say, some people are following them, that's one thing. But if someone thinks people are following them and that some entity is implanting thoughts into their head via futuristic technology, then they're very likely in a state of psychosis.
If you haven't committed any crimes or done anything noteworthy, it's especially unlikely any government is going to devote resources to following you. If you know you've committed some serious crimes, then it's certainly a much more rational fear and could be real.
Also, if you're really being followed by a government IRL, odds are you're not going to notice it unless they want you to notice it, and that pretty much doesn't happen unless you're an important figure traveling to a foreign country and they want to intimidate you. It's not impossible that you could notice it, but when multiplied by all of the other probabilities, it's very unlikely. Especially if you hold other paranoid beliefs.
>Who decides what's real? Is it not real unless you've got audio?
If you hear someone talking to you but you don't see anyone nearby, or if you hear something/someone while no one else near you hears anything. But, yes, if you try to record it and don't hear anything on the recording, then that would also be an indication.
Love,
NSA
In psychosis, this very pronounced because many of those who experience psychosis don't know they're experiencing delusions or hallucinations. It's all very real to them.
The fact that you have an awareness of your distortions seems to suggest that you're not psychotic.
it's perfecly possible to be on both
Having insight doesn't imply at all a lack of symptoms. It's possible to be aware, but not be able to correct errors in real time.
Someone with paranoia is highly sensitive to coincidences, and may have great difficulty blocking out elaborate theories regarding them which seem to spontaneously arise, as well as an intense fear reaction to the possibilities.
Some people can suppress that sort of thing fairly well. The problem is, that's not a solution to impairment, because suppressing patterns will suppress the ones that normal people consider important as well, sometimes.
Ultimately, it's not entirely intrinsic, it depends on extrinsic factors as well.
When someone is intensely fearful, and interacting with someone else, they're susceptible to spiraling feedback loops and misunderstandings.
If I'm quite upbeat and have good happy mood (not so common) then symptoms are much less likely to occur, so it could also be a depressive state of sorts.
Any logical reasoning I had was dealing with massively corrupted input. I was overwhelmed trying to separate want was real and what was not real.
The only way I could tell what was real and what wasn’t was by going off what I remembered to be true about the world. Well, part of memory retrieval got compromised too.
There are things I knew to be “true” about the world that didn’t match my mental model of how the world actually worked. That model was all that was left in the end. The only reason I came back was the episode ended. Even then, I thought the experience was a normal human response to stress.
It's entirely possible that a person can reason like that and reject some theories, and it may even be comforting to see and feel things that are easily dismissed.
However, paranoia does not necessarily involve things that are so clearly absurd, even to a healthy observer. You're talking about one end of a distribution, even for a given person, and an almost infinite number of possibilities are in a gray area.
It's possible to observe patterns of coincidence without a particular theory, and rejecting a theory or switching to a different one doesn't make observations go away.
Those observations can be mistaken or selective, but that's a separate issue.
I don't think it's real. I attribute it to a selection effect.
Of all the people with mental illnesses it's necessarily the particularly smart or talented ones that you hear about.
The more of a handicap something is, the more extreme other abilities have to be to cancel out and produce a notable accomplishment or even an average, comfortable life.
People who aren't brilliant in some way, aren't going to be noticed, and have little to gain by sharing their experiences.
I used to volunteer for a mental health advocacy non-profit, and they had a poster listing all the famous people that supposedly had some sort of mental illness. I didn't find it inspirational, because I suspected on the one hand it was kind of reaching for many of them, and on the other, it had the unintentional implication to me, that if you aren't Einstein you can only pretend to be, or be nothing.
Society fixates on geniuses with mental illness for another reason - they are likely to be able to describe their inner life much better than the average person. But they might not be representative.
People can have hallucinations that aren't delusions (in that they recognize them for what they are).
I'm not sure what this means, but you might read
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization
It is said to be a common phenomenon that most people experience at one time or another, and can be associated with a great many conditions or events, from head injuries, to schizophrenia, to drug use.
I would think that the alternative that is "in the moment" is social interaction or working on a project.
Drug abuse, criminality, and to a lesser extent - sheer failure at something, also lead to this framework. I failed this class because the education system sucks, I’m burnt out at work because my company sucks, etc. It’s so difficult to explain what’s happening, but somehow, across a variety of circumstances and pathologies, a similar framework emerges.
It’s curiously a human crutch.
I don’t envy shrinks, as they are confronted by the same framework by wildly different psychological explanations. And, it’s there job to find the dangerous ones that show up, needles in the haystack.
Symptomatically, personality disorders are basically relational dysfunctions. Some are developed as compensations for barely having an ego at all. They're fairly well documented.
The most shocking thing for outsiders is realising how alien they are. People with no knowledge of psychology literally cannot imagine how it's possible for people with these issues to lie consistently without guilt, act without empathy, and have conversations that appear coherent but make no sense at all relationally.
Drug abuse is a different issue with a much wider range of causes.
Burn out and educational failures are real issues and can be caused by real external problems. Someone who has a poor teacher objectively, or even just a teacher who is a bad fit, does not have the same psychology as someone who persuades themselves all teachers are bad because teaching itself is evil.
You can't dehumanize someone and claim to understand them simultaneously. It's logically incoherent to draw a conclusion from a failure to understand.
When I try to understand people, I start by assuming that they, like everyone, have an inner self with the golden rule hardwired at a very basic level, and anything appearing to violate that is an illusion creating by coping behavior, distortions in perceptions, or something. Psychic pain being prioritized over everything else can make the resulting behavior very confusing.
Also, since I'm not a professional psychologist I don't have to pretend I understand when I don't.