Have you ever heard someone say that they “lost their mind”? Perhaps you’ve even witnessed a seemingly normal person “lose it”, such as the JetBlue pilot in 2012 that had to be subdued by passengers because of sudden, erratic behavior during a flight, or when a flight attendant on an American Airlines flight began speaking erratically over the intercom.
There are multiple medical conditions that can trigger psychotic like episodes such as brain tumors, thyroid conditions, fever, infection and substance abuse. There are also multiple psychiatric conditions that can cause a person to have brief psychosis such as bipolar disorder and major depression.
However, there are times when relatively healthy people can for an incredibly short amount of time, lose touch with reality, becoming paranoid, hearing voices, having a sense of depersonalization (a state in which one’s thoughts and feelings seem unreal or not to belong to oneself, or in which one loses all sense of identity) or derealization (a feeling that one’s surroundings are not real).
This condition is called micropsychosis and generally last only a few minutes to a few hours and typically occurs during times of heightened anxiety and/or stress. Afterwards, the person goes back to him or her normal self and may never have an episode again. It’s not to be confused with a brief psychotic episode which by definition last longer, typically one day to a month and is not re-occurring.
Micropsychotic episodes are what I think often happens when someone goes into a rage and is seemingly out of control. Afterwards, many of them can’t remember what happened, or feel as if they were watching themselves do things as if it were a movie.
Whenever someone who has never had a psychotic episode suddenly has one, it usually takes them and everyone by surprise, but in retrospect, there is usually some early symptoms that may have gone unnoticed or ignored. Often times it’s the way someone is dealing (or not dealing) with stress.
While having a micropsychotic episode may actually be quite a normal psychological response under some extreme stressful conditions, there is probably some underlying condition that needs to be investigated, even if it’s just talk therapy to help deal with stress or a visit to a medical doctor to rule out a medical condition.
Below is a video of a character with Borderline Personality Disorder and her Micropsychotic hallucination. A funny title for this video would be, “How To Make Your Hallucinations Disappear”.
Licensed Mental Health Counselor 