When I was in psychiatric hospital after my second psychotic episode I asked the staff what is going to happen with me if I don’t get better and he said ‘Just take your medication’. For me that sounded like if he was telling me to take an overdose.

Of course I knew that’s not what he really meant, but that’s how it sounded to me. Why? What doctors do when psychiatric medication don’t appear to be working very well? They up the dose. And because how the staff said that didn’t address how much I should take, it felt like the only limit should be what have. So basically I should take all of it if I don’t feel any better soon.

This is how an innocent statement can put an idea of an overdose into the patient head.