Psychosis

Psychosis is an abnormal condition of the mind that results in difficulties telling what is real and what is not.

Quotes

 * Every man, like every dog, has his own individual limit of endurance. Most men reach their limit after about thirty days of more or less continuous stress under the conditions of modern combat. The more than averagely susceptible succumb in only fifteen days. The more than averagely tough can resist for forty-five or even fifty days. Strong or weak, in the long run all of them break down. All, that is to say, of those who are initially sane. For, ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.
 * Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959), Chapter 7: "Brainwashing", p. 88


 * High-profile advertisements for the neuroleptic medication Stelazine in the American Journal of Psychiatry from the 1960s and 1970s unsubtly portrayed tribal masks and artwork during the precise moment in time that Malcolm X described a global African community, and Bromberg and Simon connected "African themes" with black psychotic symptoms.
 * Jonathan Metzl, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (2009), p. 103


 * There are two basic kinds of impersonations: those that are publicly supported and those that are not. Examples of the former are an actor playing a part in a play or a small boy playing fireman. Examples of the latter are a healthy housewife complaining of aches and pains or an unemployed carpenter claiming he is Jesus. When persons stubbornly cling to and aggressively proclaim publicly unsupported role definitions, they are called psychotic.
 * Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin (New York: 1973), p. 52