Did you know that there is a form of therapy that has majorly helped people with schizophrenia? It’s called Internal Family Systems therapy. My partner was never diagnosed with schizophrenia but he was diagnosed with psychosis, and he had major delusions and dissociation as well as hallucinations and major depression. He’s in prison right now for a crime he committed while delusional.
He’s attempted suicide multiple times, and for a long time had a pervasive belief that this world wasn’t real and instead a Matrix like simulation controlled by AI that could read his thoughts, and that if he had the wrong thoughts bad things would happen and he would be tortured. These kind of delusions weren’t rational and he knew it but he still believed it.
Whether or not this is schizophrenia or something similar like schizoaffective disorder, he was very very seriously ill. And he was on antipsychotics. They didn’t help they just made him sleep all day. The delusions were still there when he woke up.
Because prison mental health treatment is so bad, I went looking for ways to help him myself. I came across IFS which is a form of self-therapy that involves interacting with your psyche as if each impulse or each delusional belief was a person that was trying to help you in some way, and afraid of something. The founder of IFS actually successfully treated a schizophrenic patient who medication hadn’t helped. That’s why I thought it was worth a try with my partner.
I’m not saying IFS is for everyone but it DID WORK for my partner. He still has hallucinations sometimes but they are greatly diminished and he has learned to control his delusions so that even if he believes something that isn’t true he won’t act on it and will interrogate his own beliefs all the time and try and fact check them as a habit. He is also not depressed anymore. Which is amazing given he’s in prison.
Is he completely and utterly free from mental illness? No but I would say he’s now no more badly affected by his brain’s strange behaviour than any ordinary person is by their own brains.
Is this possible for all people with schizophrenia? I don’t know. But I would be very wary of saying things like “therapy definitely doesn’t work, it’s all a chemical imbalance that nothing can fix except lifelong medication, I will never get better and I just have to accept it". Because if my love had thought this he could be dead by now, or would definitely still be lost in delusions.
