Janka's log

Been thinking of psychoses lately. Here's something fairly interesting: compare how we see schizophrenia and the bipolar disorder, or rather patients who suffer from them.

The stereotype of a schizophrenia patient has competely surreal delusions and hallusinations and is a total victim to them, barely aware of what is really happening. He has lost himself, and we rarely think of him as a "self" experiencing these things, and if we do, we tend to assume his personality is changed or disturbed by the experience.

The stereotype of a person in a manic or depressive psychoses is someone who is delusional about the magnitude of his capabilities. We see him as the extreme of excited, or the extreme of sad. When you think of a manic person, you tend to think of an exaggerated, extravagant, embellished version of the person.

We tend to think of an acute schizophrenia psychosis as the destruction of self, but a bipolar episodes as the exaggeration of it to unhealthy extremes. Are these perceptions true? Is a bipolar person, during an episode, really "hyperconscious" somehow, despite being delusional? Is a person's sense of self destroyed in an acute schizophrenia psychosis in the way it seems to be lost to an outside observer? Or is this just a stereotype, an artifact of what the conditions look like?

Is there good literature about the internal experiences in psychoses?