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<center><font color=red>CAUTION: Potentially triggering and I can't find the trigger icon. (Found it, but left this in place anyway.)</font></center>

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It's worth emphasizing that psychosis is a component of numerous "disorders" and has numerous causes. Given enough stressors, you can produce psychosis in just about anyone. Stress and trauma are two well recognized means of reaching that space.

Some people have one bout of psychosis and then recover, never to have another. Other people have repetitive bouts of psychosis. Schizophrenia is, essentially, reoccurring episodes of psychosis.

The model that best describes my own experience is that of "ego collapse" or more precisely, "collapse of one's sense of self-identity". I think trauma can weaken the structure of one's personality, whether it occurred in childhood or adulthood. When the structure of the personality collapses, contents from the personal and collective unconscious flood forth. In my opinion, it's this content, as coupled with the fragments of ego structure, that produces the experience recognized as psychosis in this culture.

The abuse I went through in my childhood was a long time ago. Whatever wounds I carried as a result lay dormant for many years until two critical things happened: the first was that my mother died and the second was that within days of her death, I met someone who possessed a number of the same characteristics as my birth father. I didn't recognize that at the time, I just knew that I didn't like the person. I didn't like being around them. There was something about them but I couldn't put my finger on it.

The difficulty was, the trauma that had occurred had been dissociated and buried. I never dealt with it because it was painful and frightening. But I also didn't need to deal with it because I had a mother who would protect me. As long as she was alive, the world felt like a safe place. When she died, I became terrified. Only later, after my experience, did I understand why I had reacted the way I did: the protector was gone and somewhere in me, was a terrified child whose terror had never been addressed.

At the time however, I couldn't place where the terror was coming from. It was in me but because it had been safely encapsulated, dissociated many years previously, I couldn't find it in me. I could only project it upon the world around me. And so, the larger world itself became a terrifying place. Meanwhile, because I couldn't trace the source of my fear, I continued to stay in a dangerous situation. I wasn't able to recognize the risk. But all the while, there was some part of me that could; my adrenal glands were pumping: "Get out! Get out!" for months. It didn't make sense to me so I didn't go. I began having nightmares at that time. Horrible nightmares, always revolving around the same themes. One of those themes was home invasion and that was appropriate because a home is a symbol of one's self identity, and my home (sense of self-identity) was being invaded, usurped by that unconscious content that was threatening to burst through my floorboards.

All of this occurred within what would be called "the prodromal phase". Not really psychotic, but cracked enough that unconscious content could seep through and was catching my attention via the various pieces of music and prose that kept calling me, that kept hooking something in me.

It's quite possible I could have stayed in that phase for years, never feeling quite right but not able to figure out what was quite wrong. Once more, the larger world reflected back my inner turmoil in the form of catastrophe as summed up in the phrase "multiple losses as accompanied by trauma" and down "I" came. My sense of who I was "died" along with the others who had also died.

This is why medication would not have been a good choice for me. Medication would have suppressed the content that was seeping forth but what I needed to do was to bring that content to the surface so it could become conscious. As long as it was unconscious it could control me; only by bringing it into consciousness could I begin to master it. My experience of psychosis was the process of bringing that content up. This was why I also needed to have that experience. If I had not gone through my experience of psychosis, I don't believe I would be well today.

There is no doubt in my mind that child abuse can produce psychosis. But it doesn't have to be abuse -- it doesn't have to be a terrible parent -- anything that seriously challenges one's sense of self identity to the extent that the personality structure cracks or fragments will do the trick. Once the structure of personality is cracked -- bang! -- you're into unconscious territory, including it's symbolic and metaphorical expression. While you're there, you have no ego boundaries, no sense of where you end and the other begins, so whatever comes up, you identify with. I know all about "being" Jesus.

If that psychosis is not resolved -- which is to say, if the unconscious content is not brought to the surface and dealt with -- it will keep coming back and coming back and coming back. I think that's how this culture produces chronic psychosis, and chronic psychosis is what we call "schizophrenia".

I don't expect my experience to apply to everyone. But it has given me insight into how John Weir Perry managed to produce that 85% recovery rate among first time "schizophrenics" without medication. He let them have their experience. He let them express that content but offered support through it, so it wouldn't be so frightening. He also helped them to see where their experience of psychosis was relevant to their "real-world" experience. As a result, they understood that there was meaning, purpose and value in their "crazyness". They weren't simply hapless victims of genetic circumstance who could never recover.

See also: The Far Side of Madness