Just because there's a correlation doesn't mean distortions inherently imply psychosis. It's difficult to know your experience just from your brief comment, but it's possible that you may have something like depersonalization-derealization disorder, without any psychosis.

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...)

That sounds right. My daughter was diagnosed with bipolar, and sometimes when she is 'manic', she has psychotic, paranoid delusions. She was the one who noticed it and decided that it was "wrong", and went to seek treatment. Her delusions were as mundane as; she thought that her friends were all meeting behind her back, planning to ruin her life.

Anyway; psychosis is more of a symptom. Psychopathy, itself, is kind of a category of disorders; where psychosis is a common symptom.

One of these things is not like the other...

> 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

Of course the first two things do sometimes happen to people. But people in a psychotic state very frequently think they're happening when they actually aren't happening. A high percentage of them believe it, but out of that sample, the belief is almost never actually based in reality.

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.

We are watching you, fakesheriff.

Love,

NSA

One feature of psychosis and mental illness, in general, is a lack of insight into one's own condition, or the lack of a complete picture into how symptoms impact one's thoughts and behaviors.

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.

You're leaving out a key aspect, which is "while it's happening". My mentally ill friends are some of the most introspective, self-aware people I know. They understand exactly what happens to them and how it affects them. They just don't have the ability to do a lot about it while it's happening.

Psychosis is not always like that. You can have an episode and then retrospectively, like days or weeks after the delusion, realize it was not "real" (tm). An example is people on the bipolar spectrum but this can also happen if you are on the autism spectrum and had an overstimulation episode or some other kind of break.

bipolar and autism are orthogonal.

it's perfecly possible to be on both

Lack of insight to varying degrees is a well-known feature, but not always the case.

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.

I suspect that (knowing how paranoid delusions work as I observe in my daughter - and also, how I process anxiety); that the anxiety is often triggered as a physiological reaction, a hormonal signal that physically jacks up your heart-rate, and adrenaline. This sensation is often processed as fear. And our intellectual coping mechanism for fear, is to try to UNDERSTAND it, to figure out if there's any action that should be taken to prevent harm. And in the absence of any apparent rational explanation for the fear, the mind MANUFACTURES a rationalization. Sometimes it's a completely silly nonsense rationalization. But if it relieves the fear somewhat, (not the anxiety), it becomes an adequate coping mechanism. A healthier coping mechanism is when something triggers inside that helps you to realize that what's happening is a physiological reaction, and there's no actual real reason to be anxious. You can still come up with a silly rationalization, but you will realize that it's not real. I think that's the hairline that separates insanity from a person who's just having a hard time coping with an anxiety attack.

>that's the hairline that separates insanity from a person who's just having a hard time coping with an anxiety attack

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.

I have always wondered why if someone with good logical reasoning skills got schizophrenia they clould not reason their way to seeing their delusions for what they are. For example (real example I heard) if I think everyone who looks at my eyes is from the government and tracking me on my walk to the park- there simply is no agency that could field and coordinate that many undercover agents nor surreptitiously replace all normal people on my route. It seems to me dellusions must involve both imagination and somehow disable logical reasoning for an intelligent person.

That's me. I had all the paranoid delusions mentioned in this thread and logically walked myself out of them. I sometimes have snaps where I let my guard down and get paranoid again but they have been easier and easier to avoid with age and responsibility.

Reading your comments, I can relate. I never found an answer but ptsd, derealisation and schizophrenia all feel like they overlap or fit on a spectrum. Perhaps some of us don't quite have the ingredients to completely detach from reality and can manage our way around symptoms. A lot of the time I think I'm just too imaginative.

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.

In my own experience, reality and imagination merged.

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.

>there simply is no agency that could field and coordinate that many undercover agents nor surreptitiously replace all normal people on my route

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 agree, two famous mathematicians who had severe mental illnesses come to mind, Kurt Gödel and John Nash. In fact there seems to be a link between the two (intelligence and predisposition to mental illnesses), see: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201707/the-mad-g...

>In fact there seems to be a link between the two (intelligence and predisposition to mental illnesses)

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.

I’ve had psychosis and knew I was completely out of reality. The problem was my rational brain wasn’t in the driver’s seat. So I got to watch myself believe and do things I didn’t want.

I had a friend who had a few psychotic episodes in her teens and early 20s. She fully knew there were no aliens, but that didn't stop the sensation that they were real and hiding in her apartment, or the actually real fright that came along with experiencing it.

My understanding is that the clinical definition of a delusion is a concrete, false belief. There's no insight, by definition.

People can have hallucinations that aren't delusions (in that they recognize them for what they are).

>Everything feels intellectualized rather than a concrete physical reality

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.

Yeah that might be it. What I mean is that I don't feel like I'm actually here - everything feels flat and dream like, rather than in the moment planted in a physical space. I thought this was normal though, aren't most people constantly in that state due to worry about the future or obsessing over the past? And that's the point of meditation, I think... To bring yourself into the here and now. I do some regular meditation and get glimpses of feeling more awake and present, but nothing persistent so far.

I have depersonalisation disorder. I got it from drug use. I know that at leadst for me it's not normal. I still remember what it was like before and how different everything is now. I feel the same stuff you are describing.

>aren't most people constantly in that state due to worry about the future or obsessing over the past

I would think that the alternative that is "in the moment" is social interaction or working on a project.

Or doing nothing!

Psychosis and psychopathy are distinct, for what it's worth.

The article seems to treat psychosis, psychotic symptoms, and Schizophrenia as though they all refer to the same thing.

But not psychopathy.

Psychopathy isn't a medical diagnosis but it generally refers to antisocial personality disorder, which doesn't include psychosis in its diagnosis criteria.

I think it's a common misconception that Psychopathy refers to antisocial personality disorder. It's a related but distinct concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_Checklist

Which is how people think clinically. Schizophrenia spectrum disorders are the most common forms of lasting psychosis. Psychopathy isn't related.

They are distinct, but the ego’s attempt to rationalize what they are experiencing is often part of the same framework. Paranoia, delusions of grandeur, narcissism, me-against-the-world (victom-playing).

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.

You're conflating different things that are unrelated.

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.

>realising how alien they are

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.

So, what are you implying, that shrinks know exactly who is off their rocker within a few sessions?

No, they seem to be implying that your armchair analysis that seems to boil down to "everything is part of the same framework" is simplistic at best.

I don't understand why people think lying is so difficult. It is human nature to lie and manipulate. At least that was how I was brought up. I think people who think that normal is goody two shoes are virtue signalling or decieving themselves. The average person in the world just wants to get ahead. Sometimes prosocial behaviors help with that. Sometimes they don't. It depends on the relative amount of hostility vs cooperativeness in the specific environment.