Helping you after an episode of psychosis
Helping you after an episode of psychosis
Perhaps you are wondering quite what psychosis is, or what exactly happens next. Psychosis is sometimes the result of having a psychiatric condition such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, however this is not always the case. Psychosis can be extremely unpleasant to experience and is when people lose contact with reality, and this can vary in intensity. It is a condition that can often be separated into 2 categories: hallucinations and delusions. During hallucinations, somebody may see or hear things that are not physically present, however they do feel very real and can be very frightening for whoever is experiencing them. Delusions are where someone very strongly believes something that is not thought or experienced by other people, for example, people suffering from delusions can sometimes think people are trying to harm them.
Clearly, these symptoms would be extremely traumatic to experience and may cause changes in an individual’s behaviour. Treatment can often include taking certain medications, however it is also helpful and important to seek psychological treatment, as recovering from an episode of psychosis can be aided by certain psychological therapies.
A therapy we offer at the London Neurocognitive Clinic is Cognitive Remediation Therapy (CRT), which focuses on enhancing cognitive skills, such as memory or attention. Individuals with psychosis may notice a decline in cognitive skills such as these, and these may persist beyond recovery from a psychotic episode. Therefore, this therapy enables individuals to train, and therefore enhance, these skills, which can also improve social functioning as a result. We can also help with the emotional side effects from having an episode of psychosis, through therapies such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). This will allow you to work through the emotions you are feeling and learn how to reframe them in a different way, so you can hopefully feel more positive overall, and your quality of life can be enhanced.
In order to understand the specific difficulties you find you struggle with, a neuropsychological assessment would be important to conduct. This is where you would come into the Clinic, and we would guide you through a series of tests to assess different areas of your cognition, for example your mental maths ability. Following this, we could create a more tailored plan that would be specifically relevant to you, because we would be able to see where you show particular strengths or difficulties. This would give us a great starting work for different psychological therapies, as we would know how best to help. We can look at these specific strengths you demonstrate and incorporate these into your treatment to potentially work around and build upon some areas you struggle with more, for example using one area of your memory that may be performing really well and using that to help with improving an attention impairment, for example.
Therefore, if you are recovering from an episode of psychosis and find that there are elements of your daily life you are struggling with, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!
