Psychosis: I am very confused.

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Do you actually know when you have it? I am worried that I might have imagined something which didn't take place.

I sort of knew. I suffered post-natal psychosis while my baby was newborn till he was about 5 months old. I was convinced that he belonged to someone else, told him all the time that his real mum would come and get him soon. But in my head, I knew something was wrong with my thinking, I just didn't know what. It was VERY confusing.

Are you able to describe what you think you have imagined, and how can you tell that it's fake and not real?

Do you want to tell us a bit more, to see if we can help you?

Yes as Amy says can you give us a bit more information. Psychosis means being out of touch with reality. VAH hope you had some good support with your PN psyhcosis which is a very serious illness.

I suffer pychosis alot and generally it depends on the severity as to whether I know im pychotic. If I have a mild hallucination like a spider running across the room when it dissapears I realise I was seeing things When severe I will see two or three full people and talk with them and not know (except when a bystander tells me when im well) they were not there. If someone tries to tell me they were not there when im ill I will accuse them of lying and may get angry. So it really depends on the severity of the pychotic episode. HTH it may help to talk to us about whats bothering you.

I can recognise visual hallucinations more than I reacognise the auditory ones. Though even the visual ones catch me out sometimes. Its taken me a good while to be able to notice them.

Do you want to talk a bit more about what is going on?

I think like crawling says, it can depend on the severity. I've never suffered from psychosis but trained as a mh nurse and lots of people recognise when they are becoming unwell and suffering mild psychosis.

Ooh you will be worth your weight in gold on here Moomins - I've not come across you before. Hope to "see" you again!

Thanks people - it was basically that I had a conversation with someone, but they denied something they'd said to me and I got really worried.

They emailed me about the conversation so it's not that they deny having it, just this one particular thing that I thought they'd said. Now that I've calmed down a bit I think that either they don't remember or I misheard. That was really confusing! Thanks for being so kind.

Op you usually have more than one symptom if you have a pychotic episode and audio hallucinations (than have a full voice are a later one) Some of the other symtoms depend on the type paranoia visual hallucinations touch and smell and grandiose delusions come in all types of pychotic episodes but there is bipolar pychosis which accompanies a mood disturbance and scizophrenic or a pychotic episode generally have garbled speech or thoughts, catatonia, morbid humour and depression.

Obviously they don't necessarily have all of the above but you don't just have one symptom I believe a minor pychotic episode is called a quasi pychotic episode if your worried look it up and you will see there are many symptoms present when someone is pychotic not just one.