To provide an extra perspective on the psychosis-as-a-positive-thing discussion: We experience psychosis as part of our schizophrenia, but the psychosis (most delusions and I'd say about half of hallucinations? Many of which are connected to delusions--eg., we're a clinical lycanthrope, we experience somatic hallucinations (paws, muzzle, ears, tail, fur, having different organs, feeling that our anatomy on the whole has changed, etc) that "confirm" the delusion) is, for the most part, a neutral or positive aspect of our life. We don't want to lose our CL because it's a comforting force for us, which is the biggest reason why we want to avoid going on antipsychotics. The only real negative part of our psychosis is the occasional negative delusion, some of the hallucinations, and the disorganized thinking/speech.
On the other hand of our schizophrenia (and the reason why we are still disabled and disordered by it), our cognitive and negative symptoms are awful. Our schizophrenia cropped up when we were 14 at the very latest, if not a few years earlier, and we ended up barely making it through high school. The only reason we didn't drop out in senior year was because it was senior year, we'd finished most of our required academic credits (our math credit had been completed in sophomore year), and we got put in classes like photography, personal finance (which has led to us considering getting a degree in accounting because we found out we have a strong passion for doing taxes), creative writing, piano, graphic design, wildlife bio, drugs & their impacts (aka psychopharmacology, fun class run by a great teacher, we had to be told to stop answering questions because our teacher knew we'd been the only one paying attention and so the only one who knew the material she was teaching, now we're annoying about drugs and how they affect the brain, but hey, it's way easier to determine when we're drunk because we know that the brain will trick us into thinking we aren't drunk and can sidestep that) etc etc--all of these classes that were relatively low pressure and that made everything else way easier to deal with. (We also never took the SAT, which probably helped)
Anyways. All this to say. We choose not to go onto antipsychotics because the majority of our psychosis is a positive force in our life, even if a few aspects can cause distress and struggle; it's not enough for us to say the psychosis on its own would be disabling. However, it's part of our schizophrenia, whose cognitive and negative symptoms nearly made us drop out of high school on several occasions, and it is a byproduct of mostly luck and early-completed credits that let us get our diploma. While our psychosis doesn't balance out the negative/cognitive symptoms per se, it does make it easier to cope with on our worst days, where we can just... be a wolf for a while and not have to think about being a person in a world that is, more often than not, scared of us and our symptoms.
Hey there anon! Thank you for this perspective!
Personally I don't have much in the way of positive/nice psychotic symptoms (unless I count my plurality as a psychotic symptom but that seems like a stretch though some psychs have gone there), but I nevertheless relate to the cognitive and especially negative symptoms being the personally most disabling aspect of this disorder for me.
