Personal perspective: psychotic experience truly is an enigma wrapped inside of a riddle. So much complexity involved that rookies would have no idea what was actually going on (even the insiders would largely be unaware of whatever ground truth might exist).
Interestingly, perhaps my clearest memory from that time was thinking that I was playing my most rational strategy to cope with my life as it was. My life was not making sense and escape seemed the best way out.
From the perspective of today that might seem an odd take, though given what I know now it actually was not an entirely bad strategy at all—perhaps my optimal strategy. How could that possibly be true? It turns out that my family has coped with dominant Alzheimer’s disease for centuries and this was never made clear to me when growing up. This was of interest because the parent with the dementia risk waited an especially long time to start a family. From what I understand this parent would have been cognitively comprised even while I was a teenager and this parent went onto developing profoundly severe Alzheimer’s dementia. There is really no way that a parent with such hidden cognitive impairment could realistically be a competent parent to teenagers.
This was the view of our closest family. They were extremely surprised at the near complete absence of judgment demonstrated by my parent in the role of a caregiver. The family had stayed back on the farm hours and hours away on a plane and we wound up in a big city where everyone works around the clock. The rural relatives were absolutely shocked at the level of child abuse that they witnessed in our city life ways. I was equally surprised at their perspective because from what I could tell it was not so much abuse as largely normal modern urban behavior.
There are just so many layers and layers of this. People who somehow think that this can be neatly described have no understanding. It is quantum physics—it is beyond linear description. So of course, the parent with the centuries history of dominant Alzheimer’s became a respected member of the psychiatric treatment community. Thus, the power balance was clearly stacked against me. When you become embedded into the power structure you are uniquely positioned to create your own self-serving narrative.
Of course it also turns out that there was an underlying genetic risk for me that involved mental illness, though this risk was actually highly dependent upon environmental circumstances. Once I became aware of the nature of this genetic risk, I simply chose those environments that were non-triggering. No problems for me from there on out. Unfortunately, this knowledge has largely not spread to others with this genotype. There must be a world of hurt out there as people constantly reenact my trauma when it could simply be avoided by choosing the correct life path. Strangely, others in the family also have this genotype yet have never had an acute episode; this has meant that they have never fully incorporated the understanding of the genotype into their life. Ergo, while they have never acquired the crazy label they have made the problem into a chronic condition that was never recognized. For me, actually having to deal with it has allowed me to move on with my life.
And on and on. The storyline is essentially endless; I am sure that there are many many layers that I have not even imagined yet.
Personal perspective: psychotic experience truly is an enigma wrapped inside of a riddle. So much complexity involved that rookies would have no idea what was actually going on (even the insiders would largely be unaware of whatever ground truth might exist).
Interestingly, perhaps my clearest memory from that time was thinking that I was playing my most rational strategy to cope with my life as it was. My life was not making sense and escape seemed the best way out.
From the perspective of today that might seem an odd take, though given what I know now it actually was not an entirely bad strategy at all—perhaps my optimal strategy. How could that possibly be true? It turns out that my family has coped with dominant Alzheimer’s disease for centuries and this was never made clear to me when growing up. This was of interest because the parent with the dementia risk waited an especially long time to start a family. From what I understand this parent would have been cognitively comprised even while I was a teenager and this parent went onto developing profoundly severe Alzheimer’s dementia. There is really no way that a parent with such hidden cognitive impairment could realistically be a competent parent to teenagers.
This was the view of our closest family. They were extremely surprised at the near complete absence of judgment demonstrated by my parent in the role of a caregiver. The family had stayed back on the farm hours and hours away on a plane and we wound up in a big city where everyone works around the clock. The rural relatives were absolutely shocked at the level of child abuse that they witnessed in our city life ways. I was equally surprised at their perspective because from what I could tell it was not so much abuse as largely normal modern urban behavior.
There are just so many layers and layers of this. People who somehow think that this can be neatly described have no understanding. It is quantum physics—it is beyond linear description. So of course, the parent with the centuries history of dominant Alzheimer’s became a respected member of the psychiatric treatment community. Thus, the power balance was clearly stacked against me. When you become embedded into the power structure you are uniquely positioned to create your own self-serving narrative.
Of course it also turns out that there was an underlying genetic risk for me that involved mental illness, though this risk was actually highly dependent upon environmental circumstances. Once I became aware of the nature of this genetic risk, I simply chose those environments that were non-triggering. No problems for me from there on out. Unfortunately, this knowledge has largely not spread to others with this genotype. There must be a world of hurt out there as people constantly reenact my trauma when it could simply be avoided by choosing the correct life path. Strangely, others in the family also have this genotype yet have never had an acute episode; this has meant that they have never fully incorporated the understanding of the genotype into their life. Ergo, while they have never acquired the crazy label they have made the problem into a chronic condition that was never recognized. For me, actually having to deal with it has allowed me to move on with my life.
And on and on. The storyline is essentially endless; I am sure that there are many many layers that I have not even imagined yet.