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Originally Posted by Sometimes psychotic
OK so I remember this phase basically you have psychosis and its not because of the drugs although they may have triggered it. Were you depressed before the psychosis? Basically I'll run though the possible dx's for you. Psychotic depression is when you get super depressed and that triggers psychosis but you never have psychosis without being depressed. Bipolar is when you cycle between up and down and you can have psychosis only when you are experiencing a mood symptom not on its own. Brief psychotic disorder---psychosis less than a month. Schizophreniform, psychosis more than 1 month, less than 6 months. Schizophrenia psychosis at least 1 month with continuing functional impariment for greater than 6 months. Schizoaffective---basically like schizophrenia with bipolar combined.
There are also some other things---like delusional disorder if you only had delusions. It wasn't clear to me if you had hallucinations.
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Hey, I thought this information was very helpful, I just had some questions and comments.
re: bipolar psychosis
Somehow I got diagnosed with just bipolar by a few doctors even though my psychosis is not related to my mood in any way, and we're not even sure (now) whether I've ever had even hypomania. They acted like this was standard, even though all the sources I've seen should have labelled that as schizoaffective. I'm thoroughly confused.
re: schizoaffective disorder
Just wanted to mention that there is also a depressed type of sza where you have a combination of schizophrenia and depression. It also seems that the mood episodes have to be a major part of the illness, not a one-time thing or something that happened long before the psychosis.
Which makes me wonder how I've been diagnosed as schizoaffective considering I've only had one real episode of depression (not affected by medication or severe stress) and that happened a while before the "active" phase of my psychosis. Grrr why must diagnoses and doctors be so inconsistent??
re: delusional disorder
The thing about delusional disorder is that it typically involves somewhat realistic delusions. Like your spouse is cheating on you, the NSA is spying on you, that you're a secret agent, that you're psychic, etc. That's what I've heard, anyway.
If anyone has any input on why my diagnoses seem, er, unusual, that would be helpful. But yeah, good information otherwise!