I’m wondering if other people’s family members sometimes flip into a wacky mood when their medication isn’t quite doing the job.
My son struggles with paranoia and some hallucinations. Lately it’s going better than it had been, and he wants to cut back on his medication.
He has a mode he gets into that is silly, but can flip into being worrisome. In the car yesterday he said, “I’m going to pretend I’m being kidnapped!” He knocked on the window of the car and yelled for help while laughing wildly. He’s fifteen and much bigger than me, so who knows what people thought was going on. But then he said in the same silly voice, “I’m going to jump out of the car and go dance on that schoolbus!”
At that point I was going to pull over, but he settled down somewhat.
Is this the flip side of thinking aliens are coming to get us or being scared to go out on cloudy days? He is acting happy, but I don’t what his thinking when he talks about getting out of a moving car.
When he talks to his counselor or psychiatrist he can come across as calm and totally fine. I have to talk to them privately when I can.
Is this wild, laughing side part of the psychosis?
Hard to say, there’s a classification of hebrephrenic or disorganized SZ which tends toward silliness and sometimes difficult to comprehend word salad.
As someone who tends toward paranoia, sometimes there’s just an absurdity to the delusions and trying to communicate them that can strike you funny. Sometimes ‘voices’ engage in wordplay when commenting on things they hear, or bizarre associations seem less scary to us than funny. Delusions can seem like an inside joke, and over time I would sometimes vacillate between being serious and frustrated versus amused and laughing at the futility of trying to convince people what I believed as ‘true’.
Thank you so much for responding! He does do a lot of making up his own words for things. When he is in that mood he also has certain words that he will yell out, including “Cathedral!”, and a few others. I just go along with it. It’s much better than the negative side of it.
No problem. My brother, who has bipolar disorder, does a bit of the pet words thing and adopts an odd speaking cadence when he’s unwell. He’s creative with language at times, and many of his utterances are obscure references to books and tv shows he’s familiar with. Some of it sounds reminiscent of Lewis Carrol’s Jabberwocky or James Joyce. If you ask him, he’ll explain them in great detail. Whether I bother or not depends on my mood and amount of free time.
I agree it’s best to take this as it comes. I imagine it’s easier to take than a flat affect or mono tonic speech. I remember as I was making the transition from my rather long prodrome to psychosis/delusional thinking, a friend of mine said she was worried about me because I seemed to be losing my sense of humor. I thankfully regained it.