My wife went through psychosis in december for the first time and is still recovering. As you can imagine it has been a rough few months and I really want to know, in your experience, do you go back to normal afterwards? How long does it take? She is on antipsychotics and is way out of the acute phase, but she still has unusual behaviour like last week she covered up the TV with a towel and says she doesn't like phones or screens around her. She is not as loving as she was, wants a lot of alone time and she has changed some habits for no apparent reason and when I ask her about it she just replies she likes it like that and to stop bugging her. I'd say overall she's like 80-90% back to her old self but still has some weird changes to her personality. Does that fade as well or is this just the way she will be now?
She probably wants alone time to indulge her conspiracies and stuff. The stuff is addictively fascinating to unravel. Is she doing any drugs like stimulants? Is she getting enough sleep?
I had drug induced psychosis about 6 years ago. It lasted roughly 9 months with a 3 month ramp up where I didn’t notice it and then the remaining 6 months was absolutely wild. Lost job and was almost arrested numerous times.
I will say that I went to rehab right as it was dying down (the end of the final month) and I had two months of summer after that before I got back to school and work. I was pretty much good after the month of rehab.
Oddly enough AI research is what really kicked it off, then it went into the whole everything is connected, predictive programming, cognitive dissonance is the source of schizophrenia etc
The beliefs I had come up with during this period, which sounded very profound at the time, have mostly faded away, I still think there was some good nuggets I came up with but it was surrounded by so much jibberish I could never make anything of it. She may retain some of the stuff she discovered but it’s not gonna be anything serious. There are little nuggets of profound knowledge that people discover on a psychosis journey that are hard to forget (for example - I realized how much of man’s intentions were towards money power or fame - and learned to identify people who operate with those motivators.
I don’t know if my situation has any overlap with your wife’s, but it took me 2-3 years after the incident above before I could say I felt normal-ish again. But I’ll never be entirely the same. I hope she gets there, it sounds like you’re taking good care of her!
