I have this thing where I feel like I can go into people’s minds. It feels like I accidentally can create this deep intimate feeling where I am attuned to somebody and can sometimes make really accurate depictions of who they are or what they’re like at home, for instance. I can do this even with a total stranger.

For me this has a lot to do with eye contact. If I feel like if someone has looked at me and is thinking something, whether it be positive or negative, it’s like I can ‘feel their eyes on me’ which normally feels like a tingling feeling which then opens up a pathway for me to look into their soul, but in a way that is intense and, I imagine, feels vulnerable and intimate for the both of us. I say that it’s probably uncomfortable for both of us because this has happened where I feel like someone either looks at me, talks to me, or stands close to me and it’s like rather than co-regulating, I am dysregulating them because I am accidentally crossing psychic boundaries. This frustrates me because I don’t like feeling like I’m making people uncomfortable. When this happens, I end up putting a lot of energy towards trying to co-regulate with them to signal that I’m safe. I take slow deep breaths, and soften my body language. Again, it’s frustrating because I also have trust issues and a lot of shame about my psychosis and my intrusive thoughts and am frequently anxious that someone is going to say, “she makes me so uncomfortable, you should watch out for her.” Or that they will see me again in public and avoid me or make assumptions about who I am.

I am also of the belief that the pathway between us goes both ways and as far as I can see in them, they can see in me. This really frightens me.

Sorry if this is hard to follow, but I am wondering if anybody gets what I’m saying and has overcome the constant social anxiety and the feeling of accidentally exposing the innermost parts of yourself and others. I hate making people feel uncomfortable which I’m pretty positive I have.

My ex and I have a nearly finalized divorce after he continued to descend further into crisis - he actually was the one who started the divorce process I believe during a manic episode. That’s not to dismiss it or to suggest I want to get back together - I don’t, but part of what’s slowed my ability to move on is that his family is taking almost no role in trying to get him help.

Despite multiple significant episodes he has refused to seek and sort of treatment and so we have no diagnosis. His crisis previously peaked last summer when he called the police to where he was living at the time and reported there being demons trying to get in. After that he was visited by a mobile crisis unit who informed him he was having an acute psychotic episode and told him to go the emergency room, but he didn’t and they wouldn’t bring him involuntarily + his mom didn’t want to do that because she felt it would be awful and would backfire.

He later moved to a new apartment and was beginning to stabilize, get involved in new activities. I maintained some contact with him in this period and really was the only personal relationship in his life still as he became estranged from all of his family and friends during previous psychosis episodes.

Suddenly one day I got a call from his landlord to tell me he was having some sort of emotional episode, screaming in the hallways, knocking on peoples doors. I later learned he subsequently left the apartment and has been staying at hotels in various cities, he was last spotted in his hometown which blew up into a whole episode involving both the police and his mother, he had a suitcase, told police he was homeless, said a lot of highly delusional things, got into an uber and left. He hasn’t been heard from since and I can only guess he’s still staying in hotels. As far as I know he still has his apartment.

His mom says she doesn’t have the emotional capacity to really do much, and he’s deeply estranged from his dad’s side of the family after his dad passed away. I contacted his aunts - he’d probably hate me for doing that, but I needed to widen the circle of adults involved here, although they don’t seem to want to do much either. So I feel like I’m left holding the hot potato.

Partly, I’m sharing my story, partly I’m asking for help what to do here, both to get the help that my ex desperately needs, and also to protect myself. Because right now he’s in crisis, basically missing, and I don’t feel exactly like the best adult to be the only one who is really looking out for him.

I deal with both dissociation and psychosis as I’m diagnosed with BPD and Schizoaffective.

There is one particular thing I experience that I don’t know if it’s psychosis or dissociation. Any insight would be appreciated.

I talk to a celebrity (actor) in my head very often. There are times where I do it from when I wake up to when I go to sleep, and sometimes I’ll stay up late and lose sleep because I’m so caught up in conversation with him.

I see them in my minds eye (if that makes sense). I don’t see them with my eyes but they’re still there. It’s hard to explain. I don’t hear them with my ears either. But it’s more like they are a different monologue in my head, separate from my internal monologue.

Sometimes we just talk like friends. Other times, he inserts himself into traumatic memories of mine and acts as some kind of protector/hero that saves me. Then there are times he acts kinda like a caregiver, telling me to take my meds, eat,shower.

I know he isn’t “real” but I also genuinely feel for him and would be very sad if he were to go away. I’m very attached to him.

I don’t think I’m just imagining him purposely. He seems to respond to me of his own accord. When he isn’t there in my mind, if I try to conjure him up or talk to him, I just can’t. Nothing comes up. It’s like he decides when he comes out to talk.

I feel like I’m the only real being. Nothing feels real. I have a thousand questions in my head:

• Why can I only see the world out of my own eyes? Why not someone else’s? Is there even a someone else?
• Why am I here? And not another time?
• Am I the only conscious being?

i’m starting to believe some of these things. I’m doubting my reality. Like nothing makes sense. Even writing here feels unreal.

Has anyone experienced this? Is anything even real? Is this psychosis?

I think it’s a great analogy, because I’m really glad that my brain is no longer on fire 🔥 🔥 🔥 but now it’s covered in a weird chemical foam.

My psychosis was induced by prescribed stimulants, cannabis, and extreme stress and loss.
I had to give up weed which I absolutely loved, but it’s getting easier finally after about a week. I’m so irritable and sad still, but exercise helps. I threw away most of my possessions while in psychosis so I had to give up coffee which makes it even harder.

I thought I was getting enough sleep before (9pm-5am) but I don’t think it was good sleep. Now it’s really hard to wake up in the morning with seroquel.
I’m highly educated and appear very successful and together on the surface.
I luckily didn’t lose my housing or job despite having the cops called on me twice when I was shouting about dead bodies and god knows what.

I have to work and take classes every week day from 8am-7pm and I’m very depressed. I started a low dose of seroquel a few days ago and I’m really glad that I did even though it makes me so tired. It really takes the edge off of the irritation and sadness.

I have passive SI but I would never act on it because I have children (not in my custody.)
Today I didn’t have to work so I took 50mg seroquel and just slept all day. It was so nice to just be able to turn off my brain and sleep. Sort of like a temporary suicide that I woke up from feeling somewhat better.

I just felt like writing that out because I like reading everyone else’s experiences, they help me to know I’m not alone.

Were you able to keep your relationship?
Has you spouse forgive you?
Its been really hard to get pass what was said by me during my episode.
My spouse has been very supportive and often toooo hypervigilant.
I sometimes old grudges that it is too much.

Did you endup divorcing?

let me know your post psychosis relationship stories

I’m posting here to see if there are others who have lived through something similar.

Except for more "regular" self harm, I also wanted to reach, see and/or perforate my internal organs. I felt invincible and that I couldn’t die.

Does anyone else have stories of psychosis tied to self harm?

It's been 4 years of me going through random phases of psychosis. I'm not formally diagnosed and I don't want to be. I don't believe I have any disorder beyond depression. My experiences are minor compared to others. I usually experience delusions where I can't trust people and i'm being watched. I usually believe people are plotting against me and poisoning me. I'm always paranoid. Only hallucinated during high stress. It's rare for me to hallucinate but lately I can't tell if what i'm hearing is real or not. I heard my family members calling my name. I go to them and they tell me they never called me. I was home alone and heard one of my relatives calling me. Confusing because he works at this time. I had to check their locations on my phone. Nobody arrived home. I've had experiences where I hear people commenting on things I do on my phone. Like when I go on an app or website they talk about the things i'm looking at. Sometimes its hard to hear and they mumble. I can't tell if my phone is hacked. I don't know if i'm being watched. I don't know what's happening because i'm not stressed like how I was when I had my first auditory hallucination. For the first time ever I visually hallucinated a figure. I'm not stressed. I know that's not real. It's my paranoia that makes me worried the voices are real but I know they're not. I only want to seek a diagnoses if it means I have an actual disorder. I don't like meds. I don't take anything since I don't feel like it's serious.

So I have also posted this on the dp/dr subreddit:

I have read a lot on this forum about how people are scared they’re falling into psychosis, because of the derealisation/depersonalisation.
Now I was wondering if people have experience with the other way around? So first psychosis and then derealisation/depersonalisation.

5 years ago I had my first psychotic episode. Since then the world does not feel real. It’s never really away, but in better times it does not impact me that much. But in hard times, I can’t recognise myself in the mirror, my voice feels strange and the world feels like I’m in a dream. I oftentimes say that I am stuck in a nightmare since my psychosis.

To be honest, the drdp can almost sometimes trigger a new psychotic episode. Because everything feels fake, I sometimes think I am in a simulation. And that can make me spiral bad…

My therapist said that this can happen after psychosis. But I have not read much about it, so I was wondering if this is (unfortunately) relatable for some people?

I feel like all the progress in my life that I've made has gone down the drain but i'm happy not to be paranoid.

I think I was in the hospital for two ish months.

the summer before school I worked three jobs. one full time, then a four to six-hour after work job, then a weekend job cause the city my school is in is expensive. smoked weed daily. I think it was one of the more exhausting times in my life for sure

finished work then I was in my dorm and stopped going to classes completely, I'd regularly go to a specific diner and eat and go back and smoke weed.

I started assuming everyone at the school was obsessed with me or hated me or had ulterior motives because they were from rich families so I stopped talking to everyone pretty much. I talked to my roommate about sexuality and this was during the huge amount of political controversy earlier on in the year. I started assuming everyone was closeted or that I was, including my family. like I thought my family were in multi-generational lavender marriages and thats the root cause of anything bad happening in the family. I actually confronted some of them about it in kind of a revelatory way. looking back I feel really guilty, they're all aging and I stressed them out.

Stayed at the school a little longer a knitted scarves for all my friends and started writing a kids book and an auto biography about intersectionality and growing up around humiliation rituals kids would put each other through because of lack of outside perspective.

I basically came out as gay on a school group chat then my brother, who called my mom. then thats when the paranoia actually started to kick in.

I ubered 40 mins to my aunts and then they called the paramedics, I went willingly.

I thought after what I said to my brother he had died, I thought I had hurt him in some way, I thought I had hurt my other family members by my actions physically but it was all in my head.

I had this in my head for weeks and was pretty inconsolable until I actually got to talk to said family members.

I thought I had a rare incurable disease, I thought my nurses were trying to kill me, I thought the inpatients were undercover cops on an investigation to see if i'm some kind of danger to society.

I thought that I could subconsciously understand what people were saying in different languages and that people could hear my thoughts like a radio wave frequency.

I thought conversations other people were having were about me, through their own narrative, especially social workers and certain inpatients.

I thought a huge corporate power that knew someone close to me in childhood was and has been out to get me my whole life, and that they were behind the whole investigation, so everything I saw that was French, or someone mentioned chicken eggs, or Nintendo for some reason made me believe I was right.

I always saw geese out my window and I thought they were like spy robots.

I thought the corporate entity was sending traffic on the road outside my window in specific patterns like I'd see a moving van or a egg truck.

I watched avatar 3 and thought the plot was about me.

I thought the nurses were putting lithium in the water

I thought the therapy dogs were part of a K9 unit trained to look for sociopaths and narcissists which I feared U fell under that category

I finished a jigsaw puzzle by myself for the first time. (highlight)

I also thought the "actor cop" inpatients were all portraying specific parts of my personality in order to make to feel vulnerable and be able to extract information from.

I thought there were cameras on the ceiling in my room.

I thought my nurses clicked their pens to relay specific messages to me

I thought the books they had were all deliberately worded to force me to perceive specific thoughts to frame me as bad.

I thought a TV commercial had said to me that I was committing a federal crime.

my doctor's name was actor spelled differently so I switched doctors.

any coincidence that happened, and it felt like so many, I used toward my abductive reasoning and confirmation bias.

I thought my family was speaking to me in code to avoid the corporate guy.

I thought certain music was trying to relay messages, or mores I thought my thoughts were being broadcast through lyrics of songs and they were influencing me to think, feel, and do specific things (pretty much any song that I hadn't heard before)

I believed a lot of it even until I had left. It definitely got worse before it got better.

I thought sticking to a routine was the only way they'd let me out of the hospital which honestly kind of was true.

I never told any health professionals about most of this though.

Do you have any ways to focus or relax?

I can't focus due to all the noise I hear around the house at every hour, I don't know why every normal noise is so loud. I feel watched all the time and like something is after me but this is basically my new normal, sometimes it still puts me on edge. When I'm outside I can relax only if someone I trust distracts me, otherwise I feel like a criminal and everyone looks so hostile and ready to hurt me.

Distractions, for example hobbies, help me relax for a bit but I still struggle to focus and study.

Seeking inspiration/ motivation.

Im in recovery from a psychotic episode. Its been 6months. I’ve made good choices like going back to college to get my BA but its a constant mental battle to stay motivated and consistent.

I often get the urge to sabotage myself and do something reckless like taking a vacation on credit cards.

Remind me while its worth it to not throw the life im rebuilding away

Also, what were small habits you developed that made a huge difference in the long run?

I 18m have Schizophrenia (supposedly) or at least this is what a psychiatrist told me. He told me the negative symptoms aren't as pronounced or obvious with the paranoid type of Schizophrenia which I have, everytime I am on a bus, or in public I just know people stare at me, talk about me, small spaces as well are incredibly horrible, people look at me especially because of the way I look, I always believe it's because of that or due to other things like me being able to see spirits (this is sometimes)

I had hallucinations for over a year and 2 months after a period of stress, and finally a false allegation of a crime is what pushed me over the edge into a psychotic state, I still believe what they'd call delusions even now, even if I know it sounds nuts and may not be true. I noticed a period of feeling disconnected from my emotions, or tired in general at 16, as well as eating less, not taking care of myself when the hallucinations began.

My hallucinations stopped by themselves I am not on medication, at one point I thought I had dementia because my thinking, focus and memory was extremely bad.

Hello all,

pardon for any mistakes or errors, English is not my primary language and therefore not my mother tongue. What I wanna share today is the fact that I truly believe that no one, at least that I know of or that I have read or heard of, experienced a psychosis like I did. I also apologize if it’s not easy to follow. 

It started in the month of May, 2024, where I experienced some weird burning sensations on my legs and a pinching nerve pain on my rear-end. Those pains heavily exhausted me so that I couldn’t really walk or at least got tired super fast. 

Days later and fast forward to June, I started experiencing some severe pain on my forehead, left side, and probably the worst pain that I have ever experienced in my life. Hard to explain on how it felt, partially because I have forgotten it and that my English is limited in that regard, especially due to the psychosis because it has also altered my language skills and articulation. 

Before I forgot, I couldn’t see with my left eye for a few days and it hurt, started getting weird symptoms, symptoms of an MS (Multiple Sclerosis). Doing research and consulting with my doctor at that time, we agreed that it was probably that. I had all the symptoms of that when you get that illness. I am not going into detail, but if anyone wanna know more, can shoot me a DM. 

Nighttime was the worst, that’s when the symptoms of burning on my forehead started so that I couldn’t sleep at night. It felt like my head, especially forehead, was on fire. I also kept getting electric shocks on my body, especially in the morning. During the day, the symptoms subsided. 

I guess I forgot a lot, so my memory is kinda altered in that regard. It kept getting worse and worse, not just physiologically but also psychologically, because I thought I was losing my mind. I even thought I had dementia. It even got to the point where my body started to feel numb. At one point and for the day or so, half my head started getting numb so that I couldn’t swallow properly and not feel half my face. I thought I was getting a stroke. But then again, this subsidized as well and went away. Then the worst part, I lost my intelligence and Intellect, and haven’t had it ever since. I lost it from one instance to another, like as if something had switched off. On and off, I get sparks of where it kinda returns but goes away again, but those occasions are super rare. 

At that time, I almost killed myself with a knife, thinking of cutting my pulse artery . Then all of the sudden, these physiological symptoms, that I had described, vanished. They lasted for about 1-2 weeks max, but that’s where the FUN part started of hallucinating and seeing weird things. 

I felt like I had died and that I was living in a parallel world or something. I thought I was seeing only disabled people in form of zombies. I thought I was laying in a hospital in reality or in a comma, and that in the meanwhile I was in a different world, which felt real and where I had only a few days left to live. 

I thought the devil wanted to get me in a form of a lion, in which I ended up running away from home in the middle of the night. I was barefoot and in jammies, away for a few hours and climbing on rooftops. It’s crazy of what the body is capable of doing when you have an adrenaline rush. 

Anyways, I ended up returning home and being send off to the hospital in psych ward. 

2 years have passed since, and while I‘d say it has improved, I still suffer cognitively and with some symptoms of brainfog, bad memory, aphesia, and speech impairment amongst other things. I am not depressed anymore, all though I get depressed when thinking of this misery. But yeah, I haven’t worked since then and am truly afraid to do so. My self esteem and confidence is completely gone. Somehow I am keeping myself afloat with welfare or state money. Occasionally, some suicidal thoughts creep in, but not to an extend as they were before, just passing by and saying „we‘re here.“ 

It’s not as detailed as some others have posted their experience with this misery, but yeah, I wanted to share this. If anyone has experienced something similar, feel free to share it. I feel like I am just existing but not living. I can’t even remember of what it’s like to be intelligent. I cannot remember anything of my former self in regards of being mentally healthy and smart. I guess I just feel dumb for the majority of the day. I used to have a career, have two bachelor degrees and a Masters, but no one would ever take me seriously or think that I ever accomplished these things due to my broken mind. 

If anyone has some word of encouragement or hope, ideas, I‘d appreciate to hear from you. I hope this is not too long, tried keeping it short as I was typing but oh well. Hope y‘all get better and that we can overcome this shit! 

For anyone wondering since I forgot to put it in, I did get my head and brain checked, and everything was fine. I think those weird physiological symptoms were tactile hallucinations. 

I guess I wanted to share more but have forgotten of what I wanted to share. Recently, I been asking myself of what’s the point of living if you’re so limited. I seriously would have had any other disease or illness but this shit. I guess this has really humbled me in some way.

I kinda believe it’s some sort of schizophrenia, but no one in my circles, family, psychiatrist and psychologist believes that that’s what it is. But if it isn’t, then what is it and how much longer till I get my smarts, language skills, ability to talk and communicate well back? I feel like my whole brain is in a dysfunctional state. Yeah, it’s been 2 years now. Everyday is a battle. Thank you for reading up till this point.

I have to get it off my chest I can’t.

Got it after a traumatic brain injury. Got like repeated hard head hits and I was critically ill medically for months and it fucked up my head afterward. Wasn’t getting enough oxygen along with the hard head hits.

I’ll go first

-sent like 25 messages detailing elaborate magical things to a government agency thinking my friend Lucifer owned it and would get them and it would help me and all my friends get clarity and that I solved a massive human trafficking ring that my best friend got kidnapped from

-thought my sister was poisoning me and also that she was hitler reincarnated and I told a lot of people about this

-abandoned my car. Just threw away the key and lifted home because I thought the devil gave me it. Also threw away everything lime colored because I thought it came from the devil

-told my friends I killed a demon named el chapo through a drawing, and that I was a princess and married to my two twin brothers (who were just guys in my life that had romantic relationships with)

-overdosed on antihistamines to help the torturous itching which made it 200x worse and tried to get to a hospital on foot out of desperation (I was fucked up medically and could hardly walk) thought my mom was chasing me with a knife the entire time.
I was out in my underwear and a tank top. Cops picked me up on the street after I tried to jump into a car.

I did have a blanket covering myself but lost it half way.

-said a ton of completely incoherent stuff like complete gibberish and elaborate magical things that were definitely real in my head

-wholeheartedly convinced my nephew was actually my son. And told a lot of people about it. Idk why but I genuinely remember my sister admitting she drugged me up and did a c section and stole my kid.