I thought about it more and I realized it was the 'clinical definition' part that was bugging me more.
Against the definitions from-above that institutions impose on us, seeing definitions from-below being formed by the impacted peoples is interesting and encouraging to me.
Some people reject the concept entirely and just talk of different complicated intersections of unusual beliefs, distressing beliefs, and things they are persecuted and oppressed for. Some people will hold that some 'truly' psychotic people are being abused by institutions, while some 'misdiagnosed' people are being abused the same.
The beliefs that I was pathologized, drugged, kidnapped, for, were ones that many other people also share.
Now, I have also formed beliefs that no one seems to share with me, that I have not been pathologized, diagnosed, drugged, threatened, or kidnapped for - that is mostly because I am selective who I tell about them. (if you're anti-capitalist and have read certain babylonian mythologies we can talk.)
It doesn't bother me, if someone by their definition considers me psychotic, considers themself psychotic, and is seeking our liberation!
What bugs me is the idea that 'this really IS the clinical definition that's handed-down.' What licensed professionals will define as "psychosis" varies so very much, between one textbook and the next, between one's outpatient prescriber's standards vs the standards of an institution that detains one, between one academic's research study and another's, between what an institution will consider psychotic one year versus ten years later, or between a clinician's attitude one day and the next depending on their mood or their feelings towards a client - that I don't believe we can find a majority of them using stable or consistent standards like that at all.
...
When I lived as a humanbeing, (is it a belief that others share, that I am no-longer living-as-such? or is it unique to me?) we didn't necessarily have 'shared visions' a lot of the time. No one except ---- was receiving those particular instructions from the trees. No one besides --------- was saying that [State] route [#] was bringing them through [other state] in that particular psychogeography.
But we basically held all of those things as 'canon' regardless, when our comrades brought them to us. This is what I kept thinking about when I watched ISTTG. Is this, then, a way of inter-faith culture-making that 'makes' people 'no-longer-psychotic'? Per one definition, I guess.







