PSYCHOSIS describes a state of mind which has lost contact with consensus or everyday reality. It is typified when an individual holds unusual beliefs about themselves and the world around them that are not shared by others. Voice hearing and alterations in visual perception can accompany this state.
    Depending on each individual's age, life history, personality, and context, crossing the threshold into psychosis is a unique experience. It can range from boundless elation through the mystical oneness of cosmic consciousness with lucid visions, to paranoia and the depths of despair, with persecutory voices a feature.
    The psychotic experience has been given many names, with the psychiatric ones predominating — schizophrenia, mania, manic-depression, and bi-polar. In layman's language it's madness. Within some schools of thought it's a transpersonal or altered state of consciousness, a spiritual emergence of some kind.
    Seeing psychosis as a disease, caused by some malfunctioning gene or brain tissue abnormality, has a traumatic and stigmatising effect on the young person whose psychosis has been triggered by recreational drugs, or those were driven to escape into their inner world due to an excruciating hypersensitivity to life. Experiences such as the terror of a dysfunctional upbringing, the anguish of sexual abuse, or the intense emotions associated with a spiritual opening, sleep deprivation, acute anxiety, a looming failure, public ridicule, bereavement and near death experiences can act as a trigger for psychotic episodes. The biomedical model completely discounts these, ignores their significance, and thus functions as an obstruction to healing and recovery rather than facilitating them.
    While drugs are critical to restore sleep, reduce fear and calm chaotic behaviour, their long term use supports the notion of disease and causes a secondary layer of disability, namely clouded thinking, demotivation, disconnection from the inner self, hopelessness, and institutionalisation. Adverse reactions to anti-psychotic drugs include diabetes, cardiac arrest, sexual dysfunction, immune suppression, thyroid burnout, irreversible central nervous system disturbances, suicidal thinking and addiction — so it is crystal clear that drug-dependent psychiatry needs radical reconsideration.
    Psychosis teaches us that no one is immune, that given the right circumstances it could happen to any of us. Seen from this existential perspective, as resulting from particular overwhelming experiences of life, a different treatment approach instantly emerges, and paves the way for debriefing, compassionate understanding, the judicious and limited use of medication, psychotherapy, home care, crisis intervention centres, therapeutic communities, and other forms of psychological rehabilitation.