Today I had a session with a new mental health professional with an "NP" as her title. She works as part of a larger mental health group with several offices in the broader area where I live.

I went in with my primary complaint being about being frequently confused, unable to focus, and having memory recall issues. Somehow, in those 15 minutes, she concluded that I was mildly depressed and show signs of psychosis.

I agree with the depression but not the psychosis. I'm not saying that I don't have any form of psychosis, but what information I shared with her cannot possibly be enough to narrow down my problem as psychosis, and its not even in the ballpark for the kind of diagnosis I was expecting, unless I've grossly misunderstood the meaning of psychosis. And when I asked for her reasoning on how she came to that conclusion, she basically told me that it was none of my business and didn't have to tell me because she's the professional with years of experience and I'm not. However, she noted I had trouble maintaining eye contact and implied she believed it was because I was distracted by hallucinations of things in the room. Well, I wasn't seeing any hallucinations, and I told her the reason I didn't make eye contact was that keeping eye contact with someone makes it hard for me to keep my focus. The closest thing to hallucinations I have are that I sometimes misidentify objects in my peripheral as people or other living things as bugs, but when I go to look at them I can quickly see its just a vaguely person- or bug-shaped object. I also tend to have waking dreams if I get woken up during certain phases of my sleep cycle, but those stop after I've fully woken up.

Prior to working with this new person I have already been having sessions for years with a personal therapist, and it has never come up that I might be psychotic, and she was just as confused by the diagnosis as I was. I have had other therapists before this one too, and none of them ever described me as being psychotic. The only things that have been consistently made about me are that I am depressed, anxious, autistic or neurodivergent, and that I may have some kind of personality disorder such as bipolar, borderline, or *possibly* some kind of NPD (although that's more of my own fear than an actual accusation from a therapist).

I will say that there was a bit of a language barrier with this therapist. It's like our dialects were incompatible. She would often look at me after I said something with this blank confused stare, and I would have to come up with other ways to say things until she seemed to get what I was trying to say. That kind of confusion is disconcerting to me for someone who has the power to involuntarily hospitalize me or who may be responsible for prescribing psychoactive medications.