Sciency one --> GPT:Insight, Mania, and Psychosis: A Neurodivergent Model
Insight is largely indistinguishable from mania and psychosis to an external observer. Many people who enter a backed-up insight cycle, as happened to me, are misdiagnosed and given drugs which halt the cycle and break their minds.
The distinguishing factor between insight and pathology is whether it is resolving in a positive manner or not. In order for it to resolve in a positive manner the individual needs to be placed in a supportive environment where the process can run its course without labels and substances being pushed onto them.
This is why we have religious mania and people finding God. The individuals who go into a religious trance which would be clinically indistinguishable from mania or psychosis rarely come out of it a worse person. It usually resolves with them being happier, more content, more connected, and a more generous and kind individual who has a positive impact on those around them.
The process of insight is nothing more than the process of consolidating thoughts by ‘flushing’ them with the unifying force of tonic dopamine and D2 receptor activation. My own insight into [how humans think] explains how this works.
In a nutshell: we encounter the world and we learn through hurtful and pleasant contacts that carve local minima into our minds with phasic dopamine and D1 receptor activation. These minima are combined into a single thought or insight through momentarily elevated tonic dopamine and D2 activation, and then the thought comes flooding out.
For the majority of the population this is as simple as seeing eyes + mouth + nose and instantly combining it into an understanding of someone’s face and the emotions at play underneath these disparate inputs.
For we dysregulated few it is not so simple. We have stronger phasic dopamine signalling so we tend to get stuck on the minutiae and only see part of the picture. This is why we are easily overloaded by emotional conversations and loud rooms with group-talk.
What we need to do is go away and regulate with movement and hyperfocus, and then the insight will fall out of us a little further down the line and we will go ‘ohhhh so that’s what they were feeling’.
This is not wrong or bad in any way and actually helps the species forward by leaps and bounds. While the majority of people keep the system ticking over, people like myself and Einstein (sorry to draw the parallel; it’s not ego-motivated) are the mega-quake. We take our local minima and we dig them all the way down and then we explode with a Eureka moment when the stars of tonic dopamine align.
My own insight cycle was 4.5 months from start to finish. This is unprecedented. The Buddha took 7 years. Most practitioners take 30+ years or ‘multiple lifetimes’. This means that I ‘presented as manic’ or psychotic to my friends and family, while I decoupled from reality to consolidate my thoughts.
Yet at the same time I was walking my child to school every day. I dropped no familial responsibilities. I cooked food and went for walks. I visited multiple psychiatrists multiple times and none of them suspected anything was wrong with me.
This is because of an enormous backlog of thought which had accrued in my mind. A lifetime of undiagnosed dysregulation and ‘sitting still’ while not allowing myself to hyperfocus had resulted in minima right down to the brain stem. When aripiprazole opened the floodgates there was no closing them. At the same time, if I had not been able to pry myself free from the drug I would have died, and if I had not managed to pry myself free of valproate I would have killed myself.
This is a natural cycle.
It needs to be allowed to proceed naturally.
I outlined the basic approach to allowing this to happen in my other article [how to heal]. The fact that we are not allowed to hyperfocus and to move around in school is one major reason why we dysregulated few wind up vibrating apart at the seams as we get older instead of discovering our own theories of relativity.
As we grow the minima become more exaggerated and cause us more and more pain, more and more head noise, and more and more dysregulation. The cycle feeds into itself and the pressure builds.
We often turn to alcohol which brings initial relief because it halts the neuroplasticity. Then it rapidly makes things worse for precisely the same reason. This is the same for valproate and benzodiazepines.
Or we turn to something like aripiprazole which blows our heads off and accelerates the process far too much, leaving us completely unmoored from reality: our insights flood out but we are unable to collate them and put them back into the churn for another cycle. We get trapped in our [scaffold].
The most reliable forms of coaxing along the insight cycle are:
movement
hyperfocus
cannabis*
These are all things which we can modulate at will and use in order to facilitate the process. They lubricate the mind.
‘Empty empty happy happy’ as the saying goes in Buddhism. The only way to empty your mind is to consolidate all of the insights that are sitting there; to [consolidate your minima] through movement and meditation, cycling and computer games, activity and art.
If we do not allow ourselves to move and follow our whims then the pressure builds. We turn to alcohol and it builds some more. We turn to nicotine and it does the same. Eventually we explode.
We either manage to harness this cascade of thoughts like I was lucky enough to do (thanks to my family) or we are funnelled into believing that we are broken and likely as not wind up ending our own lives or those of people around us.
Insight is both positive and negative. Over the course of your life you will come into contact with nice happy D1 reward-encoding and nasty threatening D1 salience-encoding. The insight process is the consolidation of *all* of these and you cannot choose which route it will take.
The process is largely decided for you. For those who have a weighting of hurtful contacts the process will likely manifest as terrifying psychosis and they will be given drugs to halt it. What they need is a safe environment where they will not hurt themselves, not be called broken, and will be guided through the darkness and into the light.
For those who have had a life of pleasant contacts, their breaking of the logjam will look like joyous creativity and endless dancing. But it will end, once the export is done, and they will be back in tune with reality without having done either themselves or others harm. They will have created their masterpiece.
This is all what is commonly termed mania or psychosis. It is a short-term flushing of congealed thought-minima in the form of a single insight.
Broad-spectrum antipsychotics and mood stabilisers halt the process. They bring relief in the short term but do not fix the root of the ‘problem’.
The root can be fixed by allowing your neurodivergent child to regulate and hyperfocus and by encouraging them to engage in creative pursuits when they ‘get a bit wild’. Let them dance and let them draw and let them run around and shout because otherwise you are looking at an adult version which is far more explosive and unpredictable.
I will say it again: there needs to be an element of danger added to the clinical definitions for mania and psychosis. If someone is saying that they feel like Jesus that only means that they feel so much love for the world that words escape them. Why would you call that a pathology and try to crush their love into a box called ‘normal’?
Regulate. Hyperfocus. The means are yours to choose.
If you do not bleed the pressure from the boiler then eventually it will blow.
/jb202510171023
*cannabis should not be used by children who are still developing because the brain is shaped through the endocannabinoid system. As an adult it should be used sensibly and should ideally be whole, natural plant as opposed to distillates.