#i feel like hallucinating & experiencing unusual beliefs are two kinda wildly different things

[tomatowielder]

hey, i'm not any of the attack-y anons, im just genuinely curious: if you do not ID as having psychosis, how do you ID? do you see your voices as an issue unrelated to medicine or mental health? if so, how do you view your experiences? do you consider recovery and medication to be relevant to your experience?

Psychosis was a term invented by people who sought to categorise us like plants (literally like plants - most proto-psychiatrists were botanists). It was created as a violent category by people who saw us as animals & less than animals who sought to abuse us, and it’s still used in the same way today. It’s overdiagnosed in POC and people with learning disabilities. Treatments around unusual beliefs & voice hearing & other hallucinating usually seek to drown and strangle our voices and change our minds on what we think. These treatments, and this category (of psychosis, of schizophrenia, etc) weren’t created by us, by people who hallucinate & experience unusual beliefs. 

‘Psychotic’ isn’t a neutral term. It’s okay if others want to reclaim it into their self concept - that’s okay & I can see how that’s healing. You do you. But imo we should start accepting & supporting & actively including those who don’t want to reclaim it, and understanding it’s violent history, and that it’s okay if others don’t want that for themselves. (It feels kind of off to me that there seems to be a “you can’t sit with us unless you reclaim this violent term” vibe here.) ‘Psychosis’ has no place in how I see myself.

After years of psychiatric abuse, I was lucky enough to work with a mental health team, along with other survivors and voice hearers (hearing voices groups are completely peer led, and where a lot of these different conceptions come from - I’m surprised to see the psychosis model so popular on tumblr, when survivors in real life have often chosen a different approach), where we slowly weaned off meds. I had a lot of support to start talking to my voices, who had become my tormenters (at a certain point, my relationship with them was so bad that I was frequently dangerously self harming & hadn’t left the house in around six months).

But, imagine if you’re deeply, deeply hurt, and when you talk, there’s only one person who can hear you. Now imagine that person tries to ignore you and kill you. You’re going to get more angry, you’re going to get more brutal. That’s what my voices did. It was a slow and difficult process of changing that relationship, and today whilst I live well with voices I still hear some fairly cruel and disruptive voices.

Meds have no place in my relationship with hallucinations (I also visually see things & feel tactile things), although they once did, and it’s important to be person led. If a specific voice hearer wants meds, it’s nobody’s place to say no meds. (It’s also nobody’s place to say they shouldn’t identify as psychotic, by the way.) A lot of chronic distress comes with a history of trauma, and even when there’s no history of trauma, by the time the psychiatric system is done with you there probably is. No traumatised person ever starts to heal or gain autonomy if they don’t have fundamental control over their own decisions, and how they see themselves. So I’m super pro other people seeing themselves as psychotic and/or taking meds when they decide to do that. 

I would call myself a voice hearer, and someone who sees things and hallucinates, and I wouldn’t really use more words than that. I used to experience unusual beliefs but not anymore. I’d call myself traumatised. (I kind of like psycho-socially disabled or neurodivergent for some aspects of the experience, but I don’t know properly yet. I’m still figuring things out.)

Voices & hallucinations are a normal, beautiful part of the human experience and normal human variation. I just see voices as something normal people hear (even when said voices are disruptive & difficult). I think people have the choice to see them as psychotic & a sign of illness & people should be supported in the decision they choose to make about that - but ime, seeing voices as symptoms and signs of illness can impair our ability to empathise with our voices, and I don’t like that this model is forced on us. (By psychiatry, by society, etc - as voice hearers we often don’t get a *choice* in the narrative we decide for ourselves. “Voices aren’t a sign of illness” often isn’t presented as a workable option for us.) 

Anyway guess who’s not going to bother trying to get involved in the tumblr voice hearing & neurodivergence community. 😅

(And I guess the q about recovery - idk, I feel like recovery has some utility as a concept, but I feel like lived experience can often fit messily rather than neatly into the word and it’s hard to use it to describe lived experiences. What does recovery mean? Recovery from an illness, like you would a broken leg, where we were definitely ill once and now not anymore? Getting rid of our hallucinations? Does it mean learning to live well with voices and no longer feeling distressed by them? Or no longer feeling they cause disablement? No longer experiencing the systemic discrimination that comes with being someone who hallucinates? Idk.)