A man describes repeated psychosis and losing a friend to suicide during a psychotic episode. He argues that society's fear-based response, calling police immediately, often makes things worse. Communities need de-escalation skills and peer support instead.
In the short term though, like most guys I know have encountered psychosis at a PMP party once in their, in their travels. I know I've encountered it many times, lost a friend in psychosis who killed himself. So it's a, it's an issue that really is like close to me, but we can do a lot to support folks in the moment. Um, if we have the skills to do so. What I have found is that people tend to like be really scared of people in psychosis and assume that they're violent, that they're gonna, you know, do something dangerous because their behavior is erratic. It can be very unsettling to watch. But we make that assumption and then we call 911 and then we get the cops involved and things just go from there. And that's not what we want to encourage folks to necessarily do. We want to give people the ability to take care of each other in community as best they can.
