Presumed psychosis

We use the term presumed psychosis because we believe that in most cases a diagnosis of psychosis is a wrong diagnosis, and that often it is the diagnosis that produces the illness (Nardone and Portelli, 2005).

From our point of view, to assume from the very beginning that a patient is psychotic means to be caught up in a prophecy that sees no possibility of treating the patient.

We strongly believe that a therapist should always try to do something to alleviate the suffering of the patient and his/her loved ones, even when the case is considered to be clinically untreatable.

By saying it is a psychotic case, the therapist, like all the others around the patient, can be easily caught up by a consequential overwhelming feeling of helplessness.

The word “presumed” sheds a ray of hope and thus one feels that something might still be done.

Then, if the treatment works successfully and the patient recovers from the psychotic symptoms, we can affirm that it wasn’t a case of psychosis.

We have had many diagnosed psychotic patients who have completely overcome their presumed psychosis.

In saying this, we do not mean that we have healed psychotic patients, but only shown through successful therapies that these persons were not afflicted by a real psychosis but by invalidating symptoms defined as signs of psychosis in traditional nosographic classifications.