Intermittent Bouts of Psychosis

Hi everyone,

I have been reading this site for about a year and a half. I have a question I have never seen addressed here. I am an ultra-ultra rapidly cycling bipolar person. I am also psychotic. Being a rapid-cycler for me means that during the course of the day I go from being normal to hypo-manic to manic and then depressed. The meds tamp down on the mania but the hypo-mania and depresssion persist.

My question is: Does anyone have periodic bouts of psychosis? 4 or 5 times a month I am psychotic. What i think is happening is I become psychotic, I hallucinate, my thinking gets muddled, negative thoughts creep in which cause depression which causes crying.

Does anything like this happen to anyone else?

Thanks for any insight you can give me.

How long does each psychotic break last?

Each compete cycle takes course over a day. usually the next morning everything is ok but then the cycle starts again

Jim, I was DXed schizo, then bipolar, then schizo...I have a cycle to my psychotic symptoms too. They come and go--my pdoc calls it the ebb and flow of my illness. I have finally got on a med combo that decreases my up and downs but they still happen. Not as frequent as yours though. I think its sorta a "natural" part of our illness to have cycles. Having them as frequent as you do would be difficult to manage. Maybe a med adjustment?

You've got it rough there, Jim.
I had something similar. I had a period of clear psychosis for a month or so, with long cycles (2 weeks apart) of moderate mood swings. Then the the antipsychotics seemed to quieten the voices and visions, but the paranoia remained, along with growing difficulty with filtering out stimuli. My pdoc stopped the AP as a trial, and the overt psychosis returned more strongly, along with what appeared to be a mixed mood episode which settled down to 6 months of daily mood cycling. Then another several months of more acute psychosis, stronger paranoia and I hardly noticed mood symptoms except for negative symptoms that could have included depressive aspects.

I don't have mania at all now (meds working for me) but have mild depression and significant cognitive difficulty, poor attention and social withdrawal. I can really relate to your muddled thinking. My paranoia is less now, but has never completely gone away. I still have the odd couple of hallucinations a month, but we feel it is largely under control and not life threatening. My T thinks I still have strange thinking and weak ego boundaries. Hopefully we will win that battle too.

HTH. TS

Perhaps modafinil will help with the cognitive abilities?? ask the pdoc there is a guy on youtube 'incandescent buddha' who takes this stuff and in combo with his meds, feels great

I don't have mania at all but I do have usually brief delusional episodes. For a while I would be delusional for one day every couple of weeks. Usually the next morning I'd realize how crazy my thoughts were but it would be really hard to think the day after and my brain would feel fuzzy and it would be hard for me to articulate. Just general auditory and visual hallucinations are much more rapid for me and the durations would last from minutes to days (years when I wasn't medicated). The delusional periods have been non existent for about a month now after a tweak with my antipsychotic, and the hallucinations vary drastically mostly correlating to antidepressants, stress, and my menstrual cycle. Current/latest diagnosis for me is Depression with Psychotic features.