I was reading a book recently about career counseling and one of the reasons mentioned for poor outcomes is that the person has psychosis. I didn’t even know what psychosis was when I was in therapy, or that I was experiencing it, and I also don’t think that my doctor knew this either. It took a long time to figure that out. And reading this section about the mental health outcomes due to psychosis would have depressed me if I was just getting diagnosed, but now that I am on the right medicine and am not experiencing it I feel affirmed that maybe it wasn’t just me and my own self that had struggled but rather was a sign of the illness.
In thinking back about this experience of therapy with psychosis, it was very damaging to me while experiencing psychosis to be told that I had been mistreated, abused, or otherwise victimized. And I think that this is because we cannot perceive if something is happening now or if it had happened in the past. Telling people that have PTSD, for example, that what happened to them was wrong, might lead to poorer daily functioning. I don’t know what should be done about this, but that was my experience. And thus, in this way, I wonder to what extent the traumatizing legal process in the case of abuse that causes psychosis is placing a double burden on victims who have to relive the abuse and assert that they are not recovered.
Erin Michael Grimm 