When I think of psychosis, an image of a gold-framed painting with colors all flown together emerges in my mind. The experience of psychosis is complex yet almost always ignites some perceptual changes, whether in thought, sensory information, or beliefs. Common manifestations include voices, visions, unusual beliefs, and disorganized thinking. Few phenomena are more complex.

The sources of psychosis are tangled with an array of potential causes, including sleep deprivation, illness, substance use, conditions like schizophrenia, and others. The role of trauma in psychosis is a topic with a degree of controversy. A review of 68 studies evaluating trauma in individuals with early psychosis found that those experiencing a first episode of psychosis had rates of childhood trauma far above typically developing participants (Vila-Badia et al., 2021).

This said, psychiatry has a dark history of blaming parents, dating back to psychoanalytic traditions, which once postulated that schizophrenia was caused by having a "schizophrenogenic mother" (Seeman, 2009). Since those days, such hypotheses have been debunked and regarded as archaic. Still, the echoes of harm done to families by these ideas remain.

A prominent model describing psychotic experiences is the stress-diathesis model. This theory proposes that psychosis occurs when individuals who carry a genetic vulnerability to developing psychosis are met........

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