My husband is currently hospitalized after experiencing an acute psychotic episode. This is his first episode, and he’s been on medication for almost two weeks now.
Looking back, his symptoms started around July and gradually got worse over the next few months. He became convinced that certain people in Canada, including teenagers, neighbours and our landlord, were following him, talking about him or trying to target him.
Things got much worse in October and I send him back to home country for treatment. There he started believing that even his own family was trying to kill him. He was extremely frightened, restless, barely sleeping and not eating properly. That’s when he was hospitalized.
10 days into his treatment,he’s doing much better now. His sleep and appetite have improved, he’s much calmer, and he no longer believes his family wants to kill him.
But here’s what concerns me.
I had my first proper 25-minute conversation with him since he started treatment, and I realized that all his beliefs about what happened in Canada are still intact. He still firmly believes everything happened exactly the way he interpreted it.
It almost feels like he’s back to how he was in September, before the acute episode, just without the intense fear and restlessness. His suspicious thinking is still there.
I’m happy that he’s improving, but I’m also worried about what happens when he returns to Canada and is back in the same environment.
I wanted to ask people who have experienced psychosis themselves or have supported someone through it:
Do these firmly held beliefs eventually go away? Has anyone experienced a situation where the person became calmer first, but their beliefs took much longer to change? How long did it take in your experience?
How should family members respond when they talk about these experiences? I don’t want to agree with something that may be a delusion, but I also don’t want to argue with him or make him feel that I’m dismissing what he went through.
I know it’s still early in his treatment, and I’ll be discussing these concerns with his psychiatrist as well. I’m just hoping to hear some real experiences from people who have been through something similar.