A well-meaning family member used to tell me that my disorder is just like having nightmares when I am awake. He said this to try and make me feel like schizophrenia is nothing that is really that different from what others experience, so I shouldn’t feel weird, abnormal, or ashamed. I truly appreciate the intention behind what he is saying; however, it really has me thinking of this analogy, whether it has merit, and what the true differences are between a nightmare and a psychotic break.

I recognize that nightmares and psychosis can both be linked to trauma and cause serious personal difficulty, where they both involve terror and the process of working out personal fears and issues, often through narratives that couldn't happen in real life. However, I’ve decided that based on my own experiences of psychotic breaks, there are more differences than similarities. Here are ten of them.

Once you are in a........

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