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The terms neurotic and psychotic both indicate effectively enough that something is not entirely well with someone's mental state. However, the precise distinction between the two terms can be hard to grasp. What does each one mean and how and where should we use it? Both words tell us about a mental pain. The difference lies in sufferer's relative degree of conscious awareness of its actual origins. As a general rule, the neurotic knows they are not well. They may be in difficulty, but they know they are and have some inkling of why. They can say in plain enough terms that they're anxious about their ex or that they're depressed about their work or that they're underconfident because of neglect at the
hands of their parents. The distress may not be easy to budge, but its existence and causes don't need to be ignored. The psychotic, for their part, is also in pain, but they have an additional struggle. They're a lot further from knowing what's really at play in them. And this for a poignant reason. They're scared of their own suffering. their illness is that they are too unwell to know how ill they are. For example, a psychotic may spend a lot of time getting their front room clean and tidy because they're soon to be visited by a grande from an alien civilization. Their chief conscious worry is they need to get more snacks and that the carpet has some stains on it. Deep down, a lot else
is of course going on. The obsession with an alien who loves them is linked in complex but traceable ways to a parent who ignored them. The king of planet Kepler 2b is filling in for a missing caregiver close to home. In their psychotic states, our minds spin creative narratives that privilege what feels bearable over what is true. Or a psychotic might deep down be stricken by their mother's preference for their sibling while consciously thinking only that their nose was too large and needed to be corrected by plastic surgery in order that they might feel good enough about themselves. Or a psychotic might be highly anxious about forming a close relationship to anyone after abuse by a parent while on the surface spending all
their free time on an imaginary love story with a celebrity who could never know of their existence. However forbidding the word psychotic can sound, we should accept that we all have moments when we are in the zone covered by the term. In other words, when thinking becomes too hard to bear. For example, when we hit the bedside table rather than register that we're sad or develop a political grudge without understanding that we're furious with our father or become sure the police is following us as opposed to understanding our sense of guilt around an aggression for a colleague. With these two terms in mind, we might say that one of the goals of mental life should be not so much to be happy.
That's a very hard task indeed, but to be whenever we can manage it, slightly less psychotic and ever more neurotic.
