High sensitivity: a way of being
Let me start with what I often see and hear in practice: people who experience mental dysregulation, such as hallucinations, delusions or mood swings, are often people who feel a lot. Not a little, but deeply. Physically, through the senses, emotionally. People who ‘sense something in the room’, who are affected by atmospheres, moods, glances. People who ‘have no filter’, as they sometimes put it themselves. They call it overstimulation, hypersensitivity or, more and more often, high sensitivity.
High sensitivity is not a disorder. It is a way of being
Those differences between people in how they feel and perceive are nowadays brought together under the term neurodiversity. A beautiful word, I think. Because it starts from difference, not from deficit. It recognises that people with ADHD, traits of autism, giftedness or a bipolar vulnerability are not necessarily ill, but more sensitive than average in some areas and more gifted than average in others. And yes, sometimes you become dysregulated because the world is not well attuned to you. But that says nothing yet about your ‘disorder’. Perhaps it says something about the disorder of the system.
Psychosis susceptibility as extreme sensitivity to meaning
Many of these people recognise themselves afterwards in the term highly sensitive. They say: I was always sensitive, but I thought it was wrong. I tried to suppress it. Until I exploded. And then mental health care comes with words such as schizophrenia, affective disorder, dissociative phenomena. All words that flatten the inner landscape into a diagnosis.
But what if we turned it round? What if we said: you are sensitive, you are deeply attuned to the world, and that is a quality, but you have to learn how to deal with it in a world that was not built for your sensitivity.
From disorder to voice: giving meaning to your sensitivity
Many people think this is the great task for the mental health care of the future: moving away from ‘repairing disorders’ and moving towards guiding sensitivity. Learning to carry it, without pushing it away. Attuning, without medicalising. Co-regulating, without controlling.
And yes, sometimes medication helps with that, temporarily or structurally, but always in the service of the person, not as the standard answer to behaviour that deviates. Because behaviour that deviates often does not deviate for no reason. It points somewhere. To an inner need, an overwhelming knowing, a body that has not been heard.
At PsychosisNet we have been trying to develop this language for years
A language in which sensitivity is a signpost, not a weakness. An entrance to meaning. A compass that says: something is not right here, in me or in the world around me, and I do not want to be deaf to that.
If you recognise yourself in high sensitivity, in neurodivergence, in psychosis susceptibility: know that you are not alone. You are not a faulty system. You are a sensitive system in an insensitive time. And that calls for care, room and attunement, to support you in who you are, not to change you.
Jim van Os
Prof. dr. Jim van Os, Chair Division Neuroscience, Utrecht University Medical Centre. Jim works at the interface of ‘hard’ brain science, health services research, art and subjective experiences of people with ‘lived experience’ in mental healthcare.
Jim has been appearing on the Thomson-Reuter Web of Science list of ‘most influential scientific minds of our time’ since 2014. In 2014 he published his book ‘Beyond DSM-5‘, and in 2016 the book ‘Good Mental Health Care’. In 2026 he published 'Wat psychisch lijden is'.
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