While psychotic experiences often stem from some kind of mental health issue, even those who seem to be in perfect ‘mental health’ can face them. Just because you’re ‘normal’ doesn’t mean that you can’t break down every once in a while.
Whether you realize it or not statistically speaking about 5-10 percent of people who are ‘normal’ will have psychotic experiences in their lives at one point or another. This was found back in 2015 based on some community surveys covering 18 different countries. These kinds of things can include hallucinations or even delusions depending on the situation a person is facing.
Just because you have some kind of psychotic experience does not mean that you are going insane or that you’re facing a mental disorder of some kind. We all go through things differently and sometimes what we’re facing in life is enough to throw us over an edge that we were not expecting. Sure, this might be confusing but it’s very interesting to think about.
Now, in more recent times a study was carried out and published in JAMA that seemed to touch on this subject in a very interesting way. This study was titled ‘Association of Genetic Liability to Psychotic Experiences With Neuropsychotic Disorders and Traits’ within this study the researchers working on it set out to see whether or not a genetic liability to psychotic experiences were shared with things like schizophrenia or other related disorders
This study found that the likelihood of having a psychotic experience was in some ways determined by genetics. They noted that it does seem environmental factors have a bigger more serious influence over such a thing and broke things down properly. That having been said psychotic experiences were genetically linked to things like major depressive disorder, schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorder, and ADHD based on their findings.
In regards to all of this The Conversation reported as follows on the topic of the findings noted above:
This study shows us that genes play a small role in the likelihood of having a psychotic experience. But this genetic contribution is shared with a broad range of mental health conditions – not specifically with schizophrenia. We now need to understand how these genes affect the risk of someone having a psychotic experience. And we need to understand the biological mechanism that causes these types of experiences.
What do you think about all of this? Are you someone who has had some kind of psychotic experience all the while being without any diagnosed disorder? I for one think things like this are very important to be aware of. The things we go through have drastic impacts on our lives and keeping that in mind as you move forward might be extremely important.