I do not hear voices (frequently), but have delusions. This is what I do, I do not trust anything I see. I found that I think people are looking at me when they are not so now I just accept it and do not read anything into it. The medication to treat us are ancient and horrible and this is the only healthy way out for us. I had to learn this on my own though since medicare does not care enough about anyone's health.
This was my first thought - hearing voices are only one of many symptoms of psychosis. Disordered thinking is a big one.
It's hard to convince someone who isn't thinking logically that they have a disease and the voices aren't real. Their grip on reality is already tenuous.
Mental illness is a metabolic disease, mine is caused by a problem with purine metabolism. (carbohydrates will turn into purines) Each person will be different. I have Schizoaffective disorder like she does. I would say we are remarkably similar in many ways.
I've also come to believe a mix of metabolic therapy and targeted supplementation (particularly B vitamins, chiefly B3), yields much better results than medications. And it seems the medical profession is slowly waking up to it too.
It's zero trust networking for your brain, and you're asking "but how do you decide which ip addresses are safe?". That's the neat part, you don't.
Nothing is real. Not for me or for you. That is my greatest insight of my illness.
You all have very narrow band schizophrenia, mine is just more, uhm, loose.
So if I feel like some shadow agency is tracking me I just say; "So what.", If I think what I picked up from the supermarket I just say; "So what if I die." I really had to stop caring about dying or suffering.
The only time I know when I am alone in my perceptions is when I ask someone. For example, I was sitting in a restaurant and I these four Mexican workers were turned around staring at me. I asked my friend if they were and she said no. Now I do not know if I am able to pick up on something, maybe I could somehow tell they were talking about me adn my brain made me aware by making it look like they were looking at me. But again, so what is my answer.
The day before that I felt my dead great uncle was telling me to go to Dillon, MT to make amends for him getting arrested there in 1954. So it was a tough week for me.
I've seen that too. It's as if the brain's "saliency threshold" is set too low - suddenly, there are no coincidences; everything is relevant and connected and has personal significance. There's no clear dividing lines between logic and intuition and madness; many of the people we perceive as smartest or most creative are somewhere in the middle.
All people have neurotic moments (That someone is looking at them, or believe in some mild conspiracy or whatever). The people who say they aren’t are lying or good at hiding it.
Someone close to me and typically pretty rational has one where she thought bugs were in her bed after repeatedly bug bombing the house. Half the State of New Jersey think we are in the midst of a drone invasion. Thank god we invented the scientific method and other tools for reasoning that can compensate for our flawed perceptions.
100% normal people do not get involuntarily committed to a psych ward. (Well, sometimes they do, but that is another story) The disorder comes when it disrupts your daily life. The thing you mentioned do not do that. Mine did.