McFarlane believes that psychosis can be prevented with a range of surprisingly low-tech interventions, almost all of which are designed to reduce stress in the family of the young person who is starting to show symptoms. VIPS is one of a handful of programs that have sprung up in California in recent years, based on a model developed in Maine by psychiatrist Dr. She was referred to a clinic in an office park about an hour from her house called Ventura Early Intervention Prevention Services, or VIPS, operated by Alameda-based Telecare Corp. That is, her symptoms could be indicative of early psychosis, but weren't predictive. Meghan took a screening test developed at Yale University Medical School that identified her as possibly within the prodromal stage of psychosis. Psychiatrists have a word for this early stage: prodromal. That was more terrifying than the monsters that I saw could ever be.' 'To know that the one thing I valued so highly was dissolving away, that I was losing chunks of my sanity with every hallucination. 'I valued my ability to think and learn,' Meghan says.

That made her eligible for a new type of program taking shape in California that aims to prevent schizophrenia before it officially begins.

So, what if you could intervene earlier, before any of that? Could you stop the process from snowballing?Īt 19, Meghan hadn't had a psychotic break. That first psychotic break can lead to a series of disasters: social isolation, hospitalization, medications with sometimes disabling side effects, and future psychotic episodes. In men, the range is 15 to 24 in women, 25 to 34. Typically, a first psychotic break occurs in a person's late teens or early 20s.

This can lead to several different diagnoses, but in people ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia, the break signals the formal onset of the disease. It's the loss of insight that signals a psychotic break. 'Sometimes that was a good thing because her depression just sucked the life out of you.' 'She would stay in her room and keep to herself,' Kathy, Meghan's mother, says. Meghan keeps a photo of her cat, Boo, on the wall in her bedroom.

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