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Spontaneous psychotic episodes?

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I found a place online, a veteran support page, and it stated this symptom of PTSD, spontaneous psychotic episodes. I wondered if this is what I experienced as a child when I was forced to witness my father's serial kills and couldn't handle seeing them. The T I stayed with for 14 years said that you could have psychotic episodes and it wouldn't mean you were psychotic. I hesitated to tell him about losing it like that until he said that to me.

When it happened I would speak in incoherent sentences, babbling away.

This is the first time I found this symptom.

Anybody else have them?
 
Here's what I found online about spontaneous psychotic episodes at a different website.

There are two types; positive and negative.

....positive symptoms refer to an experience, such as hallucinations, whereas negative symptoms refer to the lack of an experience.

Positive symptoms include:
Hallucinations
Delusions
Disorganized behaviors

Negative symptoms include:
You may not be emotionally expressive. You may have difficulty speaking, may not say anything for days on end (called alogia) or be unable to accomplish simple tasks or activities, such as getting dressed in the morning. You may appear very unmotivated and withdrawn. Mental health professionals often refer to this lack of emotional expression as a person having a "flat affect."

After rereading everything, I believe I've experienced all of these especially tactile and auditory hallucinations except for delusions.
 
I have had one psychotic episode. A whole lot preceded it, and it took place at the apex of my years of being abused. It was a domestic violence situation.

I entered a state of psychosis during the last days before I freed myself from my abuser, at least a week or so before the end of the situation. The psychotic episode lasted for about a week after I got out of that horrible situation. Before the psychosis began I was already at a deep low from it all, emotionally. I felt completely hopeless. The bad things I was experiencing were getting worse, and more frequent. He was getting way crazier. I was being raped and beaten daily, I had recently had several ribs broken by him (again), and my emotions were being pulled all over the place. I feel like all of this going on at once triggered the psychosis, alongside sleep deprivation and starvation.

The whole experience was too much of a mindf*ck for me to be willing to go into explaining my lines of "reasoning" in that state, or the specifics of my experiences. At the peak of it, I was experiencing completely realistic hallucinations, both auditory and visual. I was very delusional and paranoid, and I was being extremely illogical and irrational. It was a really horrifying experience, just completely f*cked up. I can't even put into words how terrifying it was in the hospital, after having been forced into 4 point restraints, and going through acute psychosis. No words could describe what I was experiencing. It's also really uncomfortable to think about.

I worry about having another psychotic episode. I really don't want that to happen again, it was horrible. When I get panicky I start to have additional panic based off of my fear that the panicked state will lead to more psychosis.

Psychosis is something that's really hard to tell people about. There's a shame associated with it for me, and also a fear that people will think I'm crazy just because I experienced that.. I can understand not telling your therapist until he said that. I was going to mine literally the day after I got out of the situation I was in, so she saw me twice during my psychotic episode. The second time, she had me go to the hospital, because I had completely and utterly broken from reality. I had been up several days prior to that day. I never had the option of hiding it from my therapist.

It feels helpful to hear about other people experiencing psychosis alongside trauma. Makes me not feel so bad about having had that happen to me..
 
I have never been able to speak about this with a professional so can only speculate and I doubt it would be directly associated with ptsd for me. I have experienced seeing things that couldn't have been there. I wasn't in a traumatic situation at the time but it was when exposed to the stressor (work situation with a very unhealthy person) that amped up my symptoms into fullblown PTSD and a breakdown. I remember having some sense of feeling I was properly going crazy. Like my mind was coming apart. Clinically I imagine it would be classed as psychotic depression. IDK. It was very frightening and I can only imagine what worse psychosis must be like.

My words and thoughts were totally jumbled and time was distorted in a way that was different to dissociative distortions. I saw items and words floating into the air and tried to catch them. I felt my head come apart. Someone would speak and then I would have a flash of their head jolting sideways. I don't think that was real. I went into a depression where I literally almost couldn't move or speak at all.

I have had some dissociative stuff that was decidedly weird. Does anyone have an opinion of what turning invisible and having all ones cells come apart would fit under? Thought of it as disscociation once I started "thinking" of it.

Freida, I agree that sounds like flashback stuff and have experienced that too.

So sorry you experienced that Congruency. Both the trauma and this episode. It makes perfect sense you would unravel. And Tibergrace. There is only so much the brain can tolerate. I read up once that those who have full blown psychotic disorders may often have a history of trauma which is quite hard to quantify since their grasp on reality is so broken down.
 
Incredible that you survived that situation @Tibergrace .

I think I had several when I was younger with my father doing what he was doing. And I believe I had the negative symptom one as well. As I clearly remember being flat in my affect after the first time I saw one of his kills up close.

Psychosis is something that's really hard to tell people about. There's a shame associated with it for me, and also a fear that people will think I'm crazy just because I experienced that. I can understand not telling your therapist until he said that
I asked my T if psychosis could happen before I shared that it did. Then he confirmed to me that was a psychotic episode. Yes, I carried a lot of shame for a long time. It's still there a bit yet not like when I first remembered and talked about it.

I've actually had another T try to discount my experience because she didn't know you could have psychotic episodes with PTSD. She kept saying that I didn't sound insane. I didn't stay with that T for very long after she said that.

It feels helpful to hear about other people experiencing psychosis alongside trauma. Makes me not feel so bad about having had that happen to me.
Same here. Thank you for sharing your story.
 
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