People in psychosis are terrified and stuck in fight-or-flight. Treat them like a scared child: offer comfort, acknowledge the fear, don't argue. Only sleep and stopping substances briefly help, but community care and avoiding police can still calm things down.
You know, empathizing with people's feelings around psychosis, you mentioned very clearly that people are scared. They're living in fight or flight. Yeah. And that's a scary place to be. Yeah. We tend to like think that the person's psychosis is either ruining our high or troubling us, but they're actually very scared. And if we approach them as if we would like a scared child, you would have empathy for a scared child. You wouldn't be like, oh, you're ruining my buzz. You'd be like, you know, you would empathize with that feeling and you would try and comfort them. You wouldn't try and disagree with them. You wouldn't argue with them about what But they had a right to be afraid, you would empathize with them. And when we can empathize with folks' feelings, that's a good starting point for like calming things down. It's not going to get rid of psychosis. Only sleep and stopping use for a period of time is going to get rid of psychosis in a temporary way. But you know, there's a lot we can do as, as community members to show that we know that we care about people. Calling cops should be a last resort.
