Developing a Helpful Long-Term Perspective After Psychosis

My “why” for writing has always been the same: I write what I wish I could have read in early recovery and offer a longer-term perspective to people in the throes of early recovery challenges, as short-sighted thinking and emotions are typical. Short-term perspectives are almost inevitable for many reasons.

Isolation

First, most people don’t know of a single other person with their illness, especially if it is schizophrenia. It’s easy to feel like you are a bizarre case or a mystery the world has never seen before. It’s so difficult when you have no one to speak to who can really understand what you have been through, and no one to relate similar experiences with. It seems like most people won’t disclose schizophrenia due to concerns with professional reputation. Even after several years of speaking, writing, and facilitating a support group, I still know very few people, probably less than 15, who have disclosed to me a diagnosis of schizophrenia or schizoaffective. It took my joining a support group 10 years after being diagnosed with schizophrenia to meet the first person in my life who disclosed a diagnosis with the prefix of ‘schizo’ in it.

Overwhelming Emotions

Short-term thinking and isolation are also created through extraordinary levels of emotions like humiliation, shame, hopelessness, isolation, secrecy, and stigma. The emotional pain in the aftermath of psychosis is so unique and devastating that it can be hard for loved ones to understand just what life is like on the inside of you and how debilitating it can be. I experienced the most crushing emotions of my life during this period of early recovery, and it is my goal through everything I do with writing and speaking that other people have a better emotional recovery than I did.

Immediate Challenges

Short-term thinking is also inevitable due to how many challenges you can face in early recovery, perhaps the toughest hardships you’ve faced in your life when you are least likely to handle them. There’s no time to think about long-term perspective or goals when faced with immediate potential concerns like homelessness, joblessness, basic safety, no money, legal matters, strained or destroyed relationships, and cognitive disability.

Choosing to Try

When faced with staggering, seemingly insurmountable problems, you have two options: you can try and do the hard work to recover, without any guarantee you will get better, or you decide to quit. I ultimately decided to try and risk failure instead of quit. I decided if there is anything to be said for my life after my illness, when all is said and done, I wanted it to be that I kept trying and did not quit. Even though I had no guarantee of getting better, I did.

What Patience Means

This idea of refusing to quit was one component of any type of long-term perspective for me, and the second was possessing patience. I had to have patience to let the medicine do its work and patience for counseling to make a difference over time. Faith in a higher power instilled patience in me too. Faith provided this idea to me I held onto that there could be a big picture for my life where one day everything will make more sense, even when I could not see any big picture myself or make any sense out of my life.

Major Points of Consideration That Offer Long-term Perspective

My ultimate goal in writing is to offer a long-term perspective where others have more to lean on than I did based on shared lived experience. I believe this long-term perspective is critical for making the best health care decisions in early recovery that lead to optimum quality of life and favorable health outcomes. Here are my points of consideration on long-term perspective.

1. You are not alone, and as bizarre as your experiences may seem, millions of others around the globe have experienced something similar. What can seem like uniquely embarrassing psychotic episodes are often typical among people with psychotic breaks.
2. No human being can see the future and predict how an adverse situation fits in the schematic of their life—even you. I would have never believed it if you told me during my early recovery that I would be a public speaker who is blogging and writing books on having a psychotic disorder.
3. No matter how hard you think, only patience and time lead to real answers in your life. Your heart grows when your brain fails you, where this time in recovery can be an exercise in thinking and feeling your way through matters together.
4. You just have to live your life and keep going while things simultaneously begin to make sense—you can’t hold your breath and wait. It takes humility and patience to keep living your life and moving forward with work and relationships, even as you are still healing.
5. Stop judging yourself and your illness—once you stop thinking about it and judging, your past no longer is a factor, and stigma loses its grip on you. There’s a saying I’ve heard that “once you can say the word schizophrenia out loud, you are cured.”
6. You are already just as normal as anyone else, because there is no normal. Another saying I love is that “normal is just a setting on a washing machine.”
7. A year or two can make a huge difference. Give time a chance to heal you.
8. It’s better to try and fail than just give up, even if there is no guarantee of what the future holds.
9. Never dismiss your odds of recovery. Nothing in life is written in stone, and no one can actually predict the future.
10. Embrace your life and circumstances through self-love and self-acceptance. A psychotic disorder like schizophrenia is not the worst thing that can happen to you—it’s just the most stigmatized thing that can happen to you.
11. Your ability to love yourself and love others is the only thing that cannot be taken away from you. Even when you think you have lost everything, you can always choose love.
12. You always have things to be thankful for. Focus on what you have versus what you have not yet regained.
13. No matter how old you are, you can always learn new things about yourself, which makes life interesting and gives you things to look forward to.
14. You can have no real idea where you might be in five years. That mystery makes life surprising and interesting too.