If you’re not a mental health professional, your exposure to psychosis may come through a variety of channels. You may know someone with a psychotic disorder; you may have a psychotic disorder yourself. You may have taken an introductory class on psychology in high school or college, and you may be aware of psychotic episodes as events in which people lose touch with some element of reality — they may have auditory or visual hallucinations, they may develop delusions. Or you may only see psychosis through the lens of popular media.
If you don’t have experience with psychosis, the behaviors involved can seem bizarre and frightening. Why is that man talking to himself? Is that person picking at their own skin? Why does that woman think I said something I didn’t? And what we often do with things that are uncomfortable because they’re bizarre and frightening is turn them into humor. We make jokes and turn people with psychotic disorders into punchlines.
I’ve seen this happen with multiple celebrities experiencing high-profile psychotic episodes in the press, both before and since studying psychology. The undercurrent of reporting on them is that we should laugh at their behaviors. Why wouldn’t we?
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