Nightmares and psychosis can both be linked to trauma and involve terror, unreal narratives, and personal difficulty. Nightmares can often be ended by waking or by startling awake, while psychotic breaks cannot be ended by willpower and persist despite attempts to stop them. Nightmares typically do not require emergency medical care or hospitalization, whereas psychotic breaks can necessitate ER visits and potential psychiatric commitment. Nightmares are usually momentary, but psychotic breaks can have long-lasting or lifelong consequences. Similar triggers do not make the conditions equivalent; they remain distinct clinical and experiential phenomena.
He said this to try and make me feel like schizophrenia is nothing that is really that different from what others experience, so I shouldn't feel weird, abnormal, or ashamed. I truly appreciate the intention behind what he is saying; however, it really has me thinking of this analogy, whether it has merit, and what the true differences are between a nightmare and a psychotic break.
I recognize that nightmares and psychosis can both be linked to trauma and cause serious personal difficulty, where they both involve terror and the process of working out personal fears and issues, often through narratives that couldn't happen in real life. However, I've decided that based on my own experiences of psychotic breaks, there are more differences than similarities. Here are ten of them.
Once you are in a psychotic break, no amount of willpower or desire to end it will stop it, and no matter how terrible it is, you can't just wake up as a natural response. No one can shake you and get you to snap out of it. Nightmares aren't voluntary, but it is possible to startle awake if it gets particularly scary, or you eventually wake up in the morning and it's over.
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