Science and brain research is showing us that psychosis is a medical condition that happens in the brain. So in the same way that you might have a health condition in your heart (like heart disease) or a condition affecting your pancreas (like diabetes), psychosis is a health event that happens up there inside your cranium – and yes, it is treatable.
One of the problems in psychosis is that the condition causes the brain to take in too much information from the world all at once. All of this information coming in at once can make a person feel very overwhelmed, like the world is buzzing around too fast. Feeling overwhelmed by daily life is often one of the first clues to look for if you are worried you are having an event of psychosis.
Our brain usually does a great job of telling us the difference between the things that are real, the things that are dreams that we have when we sleep, and the things that are parts of our imagination or ideas about the future.
But in psychosis, things get mixed up, and the brain has a hard time seeing the differences between what is “real”, what is a “dream”, and what is a “fantasy”. For some reason, the brain that is experiencing psychosis sees and feels (and can hear, smell, and taste) all of these things as if they were real, and the brain tells the body to act accordingly. People who are having a psychotic event can be very convinced that the mixed-up information their brain is giving them is real and occurring, even when it is clear to others that it is not.
Three out of 100 people will experience psychosis at some time during their life, which makes this medical condition more common than people realize.
Psychosis Symptoms