What to do after your first psychotic break?

Today is Friday. Monday morning, at around 3am, I had my first and hopefully only psychotic break with reality, which was (I firmly believe) entirely a drug induced hallucination so real and consuming it had me convinced for several hours of its clear and present dangers I was seeing and hearing. Which then immediately fucked up my life, as the episode had everything to do with me and my family, who I've been staying with the last six weeks in order to get on with the next phase of my life, and my actions involved them up until the very end, when I realized that everything had been a hallucination and I had now seriously disturbed and frightened them, to say nothing of losing their trust and hope in me for getting on my feet again.

The tension has eased up between us considerably in the last few days, thanks to an understanding and intervening family member, who is able to communicate my feelings and situation better than me at the moment. And everything that hallucination stood for has been easily viewed and understood by us as being about my current feelings of despair and depression that I've been avoiding for a great many years, and recently been covering up with drugs. The last 5 years of my life have shattered into the insubstantial fragments of experience that they truly are and always have been, and while at first that has been a profoundly demoralizing blow, now I see it as a necessary step in sorting out everything about my life and doing the necessary inward digging of self understanding I need to do in order to better realize my potentials and feel best about my decisions I am to be making this next year. It was such a fundamental turning point that it might as well have been inevitable, and now I just have to follow through with this major era of change and not fall into the same comfortable delusions I've cast myself under the last several years.

But the two things that still resound are the following:
- How to keep one's chin up in the presence of others who know about what happened - including how to inform various friends of mine who I'd like to be straight with but have a hard time explaining how it is I've gotten to this point - and
- How to deal with drugs again?

I'm not ready nor interested in sobriety at this point in my life, although perhaps after some therapy in the next couple of months I'll feel ready for that kind of clarity in my life. But at the moment I still want to mess around with these drugs a bit (RC cathinones, pot, etizolam, kratom, etc., all of which I was on when I flipped out). I'm honestly a little scared of having another believable hallucination if I end up that messed up again, and that is motivating me to stay away from them at the moment, but this absitinence cannot last. Being that no one in my family has ever suffered from anything more than depression and alcoholism, I trust that I am not likely to ever become insane. Yet my faith in my ability to get royally fucked up, as well as my ability to maintain an even facade to those around me, is so shook up that I don't know what to say to some people. A friend called as I wrote this and I avoided speaking to him about what had happened, only that I might be sticking around longer than I had planned, because something came up recently that made me examine my life, and that I'd tell him later. And that's to say nothing of my family and their friends they've told, who saw me in that wretched state of paranoid delusion, without a doubt the most embarrassing situation I've ever been in. It's a weird position to be in, to take responsibility for something your subconsicous threw at you to force you to deal with all the shit you've been repressing - like a boomerang covered in your own shit that finally flies back at you to hit you in the face. Has anyone ever dealt with these kinds of situations and issues before? Your thoughts, no matter how succinct, are appreciated.

Realize that time will help sort out the pieces.

Your family are your family. They won't change their entire opinion of you based off of one event. Putting distance and silence between you and them will probably only make matters worse.

If your friends are really your friends, you can explain something like this to them and talk to them about it and they will have your back.

Drugs can uncover and exacerbate any sort of mental health or emotional problems you've been repressing. Some people may see this as a reason to not do drugs, other may see it as a purposeful outcome.

Since you had such intense effects and revelations from your most recent trip, you might want to consider a brief period of sobriety to reflect on that before you try it again. I find that it's helpful to keep the mind clear and not get too lost in it.


Good luck, feel better