In Jung’s day, many people with psychosis felt persecuted by the Jesuits. In modern times, delusions related to the Internet, television and cameras are more common – we read in the book Conversations after the end of the world.
One of the patients kept searching in the bathroom, because she was convinced that there was an invisible camera installed in it by a neighbor. Another sick man heard voices jump out of the window and kill yourself or we’ll kill you.
This unique work, which has recently appeared on sale, contains the memories of people with the experience of psychosis who anonymously described their experiences on the Tacyjakja.pl portal. They were commented on by Dr. Stanisław Murawiec, a psychiatrist and psychotherapist at the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology in Warsaw. It is supposed to help understand the world of people experiencing psychosis.
Neurobiologists explain that persecutory thoughts arise as a result of a change in the perception of reality. In the brain of people experiencing them, the centers responsible for receiving important signals from the environment are activated too much. A person experiencing this state notices that something has changed, has the impression that others are talking about him, looking at him – emphasizes Dr. Murawiec.
Until the last moment before the outbreak of psychosis, patients are convinced that they control themselves. A woman ill from the age of 3 recalls that she did not sleep at night already in the preschool period, because she heard footsteps and was convinced that someone was walking around the apartment. There were people hiding behind the curtains who wanted to hurt her. Another sick woman was afraid to leave the house to think that everyone was looking at her.
My delusions were terrible, associated with responsibility for sins, errors, including eternal damnation in the torments of life, with no possibility of freeing myself through death. I thought that I would suffer cruelly in immortality – writes a patient who signed himself as Phoenix303.
Dr. Murawiec explains that psychoses contain individual content that comes from the psyche of a given person – from their life, experiences, desires and fears. They arise from the disruption of deep brain structures, known as the striatum, and confuse information that has been kept separate. They begin to connect and interfere with each other.
This can result in delusions, hallucinations, or strange speech and behavior. And the way of thinking too quickly, based on information that does not authorize you in any way.
For example, I saw when I felt unimportant, unwanted, unnecessary, known characters – mainly recognizable foreign actors and actresses. Then I had the impression that they came especially for me, to show themselves and cheer them up – the patient recalls.
Patients who are treated successfully, distance themselves from their experiences, but they do not always want to completely remove them from their memories, because they feel as if they are missing something. One of the patients explains that it is difficult for us to destroy something that we have built ourselves, and by ceasing to believe in delusions – we destroy them. And he adds: While taking medication, I felt that part of me was dying inside, that doctors were tearing away a part of my world so that I would be normal people in the opinion of culture and customs.
Dr. Murawiec argues that treatment is the regaining by the patient of control over his own life and himself. However, some of their beliefs may still remain. Some patients feel that they are not being bullied now, but they were before. Some try not to think about previously experienced psychoses, but others try to find out what it was all about.
Zbigniew Wojtasiński
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