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Key points
- Blaming yourself for psychosis can demonstrate a misplaced sense of control and power.
- You can't judge yourself by the same standards when you lose insight as when you are stable.
- Having psychosis does not make you a bad person, nor the type of person who gets serious mental illness.
- You must give yourself grace and forgive yourself, even though you've done nothing wrong.
Psychotic breaks, even though they are deemed mental versus physical, are not under our control and discretion. As a control freak for quite some time in my life, I have always been an overly responsible, serious person who is hard on myself. By believing I am in control of everything around me, I can make myself responsible for everything. If I’m responsible, then I have the power to change whatever the situation is, no matter how profound. This is why the psychotic breaks in my life were so personally catastrophic. I took responsibility and self-blamed for having these episodes as if I had done something wrong and I had the power to stop them. By making things all my fault, I’ve felt like I have total power and control over myself and my environment.
Understanding It’s an Unavoidable Medical Diagnosis
The first way to stop blaming yourself, though, is to realize that psychosis is not a character flaw or a punishment you deserve. No one deserves psychosis or the collateral damage involved. There is nothing about psychosis that marks you as the certain type of person who contracts a stigmatized mental illness. Medical illnesses like psychosis are beyond personal control, and they do not discriminate. No one can will themselves out of cancer, heart disease, or any other medical condition by simply being a strong, virtuous person. Once you can see your brain as just another organ of the body, not having to do with your essential self, you can have objectivity and see this situation clearly.
While we can be so worried about other people’s stigma toward our experiences, sometimes we miss our own personal stigma toward what happens to us as individuals. It’s easy to think that since psychosis is “bad,” I’m not a “good” person if I have them. Psychotic breaks are not a mistake you have made, and just having a break is not the same as committing a crime. Sometimes, in a psychiatric ward, you can feel like you are there for doing something wrong. Unfortunately, some people with psychosis are kept in jail (even if they haven’t committed a crime) because there are no hospital beds available, but it’s still shaming and easy to think what you have done is bad in this case.
Accepting There Is Nothing I Could Have Done Differently
As a patient with serious mental illness, it is easy to ask what-ifs. What would my life be like had I never had psychotic breaks? What would life be like if I had never gone off my medication? And from those questions, it makes you think you had a choice or option whether you have this illness. Believing you had the choice whether to have this illness (but you blew it) feels so defeating and self-shaming. The truth is that mental illness is present through no choice of your own and has been possibly influencing this very decision-making. Even though I did go off my medication, which led to my first and third hospitalizations, I told myself that I was not well enough to make a good decision to stay on medication. I did the best I could, considering my health condition at those points. Today, many years later, I consider that I am in control as long as I take my antipsychotic. It is a hard lesson learned, but if there is any way to control my well-being and environment, it is to take an antipsychotic for life consistently.
Forgiving Myself
Letting go of judgment on yourself and forgiving yourself for your experiences takes grace, wisdom, and humility. You have to realize that you can’t judge your behaviors and decision-making when psychotic the same way you would if you were stable because when you are psychotic, you lose all insight and control. You can’t set the same personal standards and expectations for both the stable and unstable versions of yourself.
You have to give yourself credit that you are but one human being, and you are capable of having any type of mental illness like anyone else. I was so hard on myself about psychosis and my diagnosis of schizophrenia, like I was weak and a failure to all who knew me. How could I have made unwise decisions like I made? How could I have acted so bizarrely and out of character? How could I have embarrassed myself like that? The only thing I can do at this point is have grace with myself, focus on how well my present health is, and put myself in a position to succeed through life balance, therapy, and medication use.
My years of mental illness have been a humbling experience, where I have learned to not be so much harder on myself and hold myself to an impossible standard, especially given the illness I have. The truth is, I really should not have to forgive myself for anything because having a medical condition is not my fault, but it does feel like it sometimes. That’s when I have to embrace that no one, including myself, has complete control and then let go of the past. I must appreciate the person I am now and the future I have ahead of me instead of looking back with regret and self-assigning blame for the past.
I have had to learn that I don’t have this magic to transform unavoidable circumstances within me and around me. I have to appreciate what I can control, allow myself to just be human, and let go of what I realize no one has control over.
