Psychosis As Transformation Versus Disorder

Reframing Distress And Reclaiming Madness

What if psychosis wasn’t a disorder to be fixed, but a process to be understood? What if, instead of a medical emergency to be subdued, psychosis was an expression of a self in flux; of a consciousness undergoing transformation?

In much of my work; from The New Normal to Unusual Medicine and more, and through years of research, community work, and lived experience. I’ve argued that the medical model of madness is harmful. It reduces expansive, often terrifying, yet somehow beautiful states of being into pathology, erases the context in which those states arise, and strips us of our autonomy in the name of “care”.

This piece is a call to reframe psychosis, not as a discrete disorder, but as an emergent, often meaning-laden expression of a self in chaos. Not chaos in the colloquial, dismissive sense, but chaos as potential. The kind of disintegration that precedes reformation. The kind of madness that births new ways of being.

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