Terms like these are suddenly so ubiquitous: highly sensitive, neurodiverse, sensitive to psychosis. They sometimes seem just like modern labels – seemingly simple terms for complex conditions. But if you observe them a little longer, they seem to become more meaningful. Because what if they’re not just individual labels, but different ways of saying the same thing? Let’s call it: a case of human sensitivity.

Highly sensitive

I’ll start with something I hear and see a lot: people who experience psychological disruption – hallucinations, delusions, mood swings – are often people who feel a lot. And not a little bit, but very deeply. Physically, sensory, and emotionally. They’re people who ‘can feel something in the air’, can sense a certain atmosphere, mood, or looks from other people. People who ‘have no filter’, or so they often say so themselves. They call it overstimulation, hypersensitivity, or – more and more often – high sensitivity.

High sensitivity is not a disorder, it’s a way of being

An umbrella term for all these different ‘ways of being’ is ‘neurodiversity. A beautiful word in my opinion, because it assumes difference, not deficiency. It acknowledges that people with ADHD, autistic tendencies, giftedness, or vulnerability to bipolarity, are not necessarily ill. More sensitive than the average person in some areas, and maybe more gifted in others. And yes, sometimes this is disordered, because the world is not tuned to you, but that doesn’t say anything about your ‘disorder’ Maybe it says something about the system being disordered.

Sensitivity to psychosis as extreme sensitivity to its meaning

Many of these people recognise themselves in the term highly sensitive. They say: I have always been sensitive, but I thought it was wrong. I tried to repress it. Until l exploded. And then the mental healthcare sector starts throwing terms like schizophrenia, affective disorder, and dissociative symptoms at you. These are all terms that squash everything within you to a simple diagnosis.

But what if we would turn it around? What if we would say: your nervous system is sensitive. You’re very finely tuned to the world, and that is a good quality – but you will need to learn how to handle it, in a world that wasn’t designed for your sensitivity.

From disorder to voice: to give meaning to your sensitivity

Many people think that this is the task of the mental healthcare sector of the future: stop trying to ‘fix the disorders’, and start helping people manage their sensitivity. Not pushing it away, but helping them carry it. Don’t medicate, but adjust. Don’t control, but co-regulate.

And yes, sometimes medication can help achieve this – temporarily or structural – but always ‘servicing’ the person, not as a standard response to abnormal behaviour. Because the behaviour that deviates, often doesn’t deviate without reason. It points at something. An inner need, an all-encompassing knowing, a body that’s not been listened to.

At PsychosisNet we have been trying to develop this approach for years

An approach in which sensitivity is not a weakness, but an indicator. An entrance to meaning. A compass that says: something isn’t right – in me or in the world around me – and I don’t want to be blind to this.

If you recognise yourself as highly sensitive, or neurodiverse, or sensitive to psychosis, know that you’re not alone. You are not a faulty system. You are a sensitive system in insensitive times. And that requires care, space, and adjusting. Not to change you, but to support you.

Translated from Dutch by SGM Taplin