Stage 3 of treatment: the struggle to find perspective and meaning again
When someone has had a psychosis for the first time, stage 3 is the beginning of a process of accepting a vulnerability that has a very great impact on life. It is about the struggle to find perspective again.
What has happened?
This stage often starts with the question: “What has happened?”
The stage of struggling with psychosis is about recovering physically and mentally, working through painful recent events, regaining trust and self-confidence, and picking up the thread of life again. That is a struggle, because many things that used to be self-evident have fallen away.
Support and/or treatment is very important in this stage
Attention is needed in different areas of life to get everything back on track. Picking up studies and work or a daily structure, dealing with medication, working through traumas, repairing relationships. All these themes need attention, and it is important to carry the responsibility together with others.
Hope and perspective
In the stage of struggling with psychosis, finding perspective, hope, meaning and self-confidence again is decisive. Those who dare to accept help will notice that a good combination of information, contact with experts by experience, medication and therapy can make sure that there is a future again after the psychosis.
Gaining insight into the past
Treatment can be aimed at gaining insight into the past, so as to get an eye for the future again by starting to formulate your own goals. Working through and understanding your psychotic experiences is important too. It can be very good to talk about this with experts by experience.
Dare to ask
So in treatment stage 3 someone struggles with the burden of psychosis susceptibility and learns to discover how this burden can be carried in life. Good information and decisions about the duration of each part of the process can help with that.
Questions that come up are:
- How long do you continue with the medication?
- How long do you wait before looking for work?
- How long do you continue with day treatment or job training?
- How long does a therapy last?
- Which treatments are there?
- What is recovery?
So be curious, and keep asking.
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'.
Want to read more?
Blogs by Jim van Os can be read here
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