This article by consultant psychiatrist Rosa Ritunnano has been published on the Psyche website. It begins:
“How can you best engage with a person who has psychosis, when their beliefs seem to differ radically from your own? What if those beliefs differ radically from what you know as reality?
Consider a Sunday morning – you wake to the sound of the playlist set as your alarm. Instead of snoozing the music and curling up for a few more minutes, you realise that today feels very different somehow. At first you cannot place what is wrong, but you start to notice that the lyrics of the songs are about you. Not just that you can relate, but there are messages behind the songs that specifically refer to you. You are about to dismiss this as the glitches of a sleep-addled brain, when you notice that the light filtering through the curtains looks peculiar. You can’t quite describe it, so you approach the window. Looking out, your neighbours move in a just slightly awkward routine, like marionettes pulled by unseen strings in an uncanny facsimile of the neighbourhood scene. Distracted by what you’re seeing, you then notice you can hear their voices, as clear as if they were beside you. Yet they don’t appear to be speaking …”
You can read more from here.
