...I was homeless and staying in a park with some others and we had been smoking and shooting speed for at least 3 days, no sleep, no food. I've gone longer, but the stress of my situation helped make me crack. I remember bits and pieces:
I thought everyone on the street was part of a hidden camera gameshow filming me. ...
When that one ended, I walked miles until I was in a different part of town. Everything I saw had specific meaning to me. License plates, the number of trees, buses that passed by. I jumped in front of a certain number bus thinking it was my destiny.....
This is pretty much exactly my experience. I would pan-handle on the side of the road, and every license plate had a connecting message to some part of my life or a thought I was having the thought just before I saw it, I thought the powers-that-be were sending me messages to get my life in order, and not in any kind of 'hypothetical' superstitious way, but in a literal, hands on way. I still don't really distinguish what happened then with reality, I don't know what was real or not. Things my friends said to me, etc. I thought they were possessed by angels from heaven to drop secrets of my purpose in life, and I am not even religious.
It was so vivid and real that I still many times think everything was tied to some great scheme or pattern of the universe referencing me directly, and meth only made my mind work fast enough to perceive the otherwise innocuous happenings as the profound revelations as they are meant to be that are always around us but we never normally grasp.
Of course I do not pretend to think they are such sanely, but my insanity from then still regards them so. It's a confirmation bias of the brain, the data was archived "as so" in your memory at that moment, and you'll never fully get over it to think it wasn't real.
I over-think things as it is, it's bad when you tie it to people rather than to fate/God, because then you become self-conscious, angry and embarrassed, and think they are judging you or mocking you (e.g. the 'game show' scenario). For instance, because I study pharmacology and technology, I had the crazy idea that the government was radio-labeling street meth so that they could read street junkie's minds and implant thoughts in their minds via satellites as a social experiment, and since I was well educated in molecular biology they took a special interest in me and that's why there were so many 'miraculous signs' that they were toying with me with, by overwriting what I was saying to my friends and what I heard them and myself say inside my brain, so it would appear they were hearing things I was only thinking. etc.
The worst part probably is, now I enjoy the 'sketched out' aspects of methamphetamine psychosis, because I quietly and passively just take it all in and know everything is going to seem like a divine message of my importance in this world or aliens recruiting me as The Last Starfighter. I try to keep quiet in groups to avoid saying insane things. Most of the pleasure and actual euphoria is gone the last few times I've used, but the psychosis gets more and more prominent and takes longer and longer to go away. I haven't used in months, and only now is my thinking returning to fully normalized. Though I know people who have used for much of their lives, and they become crazier faster too. One either learns to act causal and ignore it, or become a raving lunatic on it until they quit it.
I've never had psychosis because I've never allowed myself to stay awake for more than just one night. I also drank water and ate (usually a good meal right before I begin.) If you're not staying up for a bloody week whilst starving and dehydrating yourself, you won't have to worry about this at all.
That makes no difference whatsoever in true amphetamine psychosis. I've stayed up ten days, slept for four hours, stayed up another 10 days, eaten once, etc. and have been fine (weak and can't focus, but am totally sane). Then another time I'll do one small shot after weeks off of it, sleeping and eating fine for those weeks, and instantly think the books in front of me have secret messages from God/aliens/gov't conspiracy in them, made for me at this moment in time because they knew I'd be reading it at this exact time and moment in history.
I believe there's long term sensitization. It's more likely to occur when, like Gummybearkatie said, you're under emotional stress and in a very dark place otherwise with where your life is heading. When you're so depressed about things you shouldn't be happy, meth just then makes you crazy, and makes your brain invent and believe insanely unlikely scenarios for happiness in the animal brain which are conscious paranoid nightmares for the intellectual brain.
I would say, get the user to sleep and eat, to stop the current psychosis in it's tracks. (Not always easy)
Stopping the habit of speed, obviusly prevents future psycosis from speed use.
Not necessarily, as OpiYum said, and I've experienced first hand, true amphetamine psychosis can last for months afterward.
...Over time, it will seriously fuck you up worse than you can possibly imagine. Of all the substances that I've gotten hung up on, speed was the worst. I did and said things that I'll never be able to undo or take back. I won't even touch any uppers ever again. Even just caffeine makes me feel too fucked up now.
Same here, and if I didn't (sadly) learn to enjoy aspects of the psychosis, I'd do the same.
....
Oh, a final thing; the colors pink & green, together as complementary colors, a particular shade of each usually in the light spectrum, e.g. bright magenta & bright teal, still haunt me as a remnant of my amphetamine psychosis, like they are some embedded cosmic message. Recently I got new headphones for my computer, realizing the mic & headset jacks on the back of computers are pink & green. An unsettling feeling creeps over me. I remember reading a forum where people were using large amounts of salvia, and during their high level abuse perceive that they were being taken into a parallel world filled with people in red & yellow who were malicious and laughing at them. I say people because others actually chimed in, in complete earnest, and explained how they "got the red & yellow demons also from using salvia!" Well I got the same experience in the mundane world, but with meth, and concerning the colors pink & green.
