What Is Psychosis?

Imagine the feeling of someone watching you as you walk down the hallway or sit on the school bus. Most people have experienced this feeling and it is uncomfortable to say the least. It amounts to impression that the on-looker’s eyes are burning holes in your head, but if you were to turn around, they would seem to be looking in the opposite direction. Most people could shake off this strange phenomenon, but a person with psychosis more than likely would not be able to. Psychosis is a range of symptoms that causes delusions or hallucinations that interrupt how the person would normally be able to function and worsens as the symptoms strengthen.

Psychosis is condition that is categorized by hallucinations or delusions and is not an illness
A basic description of psychosis it that “if you have psychosis, you might see or hear things, or hold unusual beliefs, that other people do not” (“What is Psychosis?”). A person is diagnosed with psychosis through a psychiatric assessment but other explanations can be found with medical tests and equipment (“Psychosis” Healthline). According to studies, “approximately 3 in 100 people will experience an episode of psychosis during their lives” (“Psychosis” National...).

Psychosis includes having a delusion or hallucination. Having a hallucination would be categorized by “[the] sensory perception in the absence of outside stimulus” (“Psychosis” Healthline). This means that a hallucination is when someone thinks that they have perceived something with their five senses,
Three common myths are: People with psychosis are psychopaths, you can contract psychosis from someone, and people with psychosis are bad people or do bad things. There is much information about psychosis that contradict these statements. The first myth can be proved untrue because a person with psychosis is actually the exact opposite of a psychopath. Psychopaths are not capable of compassion and are manipulating in their relationships with other people. They are also potentially violent. Therefore, a psychopath is about the opposite of someone with psychosis. The second illusion that is affiliated with psychosis is that you can attain these symptoms from another person. This is untrue because “‘Psychosis is a medical condition that develops from an imbalance of brain chemicals, in the same way that cancer develops from an ‘imbalance’ of cancer cells’” (“Psychosis Myths and Misinformation”). Cancer and Psychosis is similar in the way that cancer only requires one cell doing it’s job incorrectly, to interrupt and overtake all the correct functions of the other cells. With psychosis, only a few chemicals in the brain need to be working incorrectly to cause people to hallucinate or have delusions. Both cancer and psychosis are caused by the overstimulation of brain or cell activity. The third myth is that people with psychosis are bad people and have malicious intentions. In fact, it is actually rare for people with this