I have a significant personal history of mental illness including anxiety disorders and OCD diagnosed during my childhood/teens (and a major episode about 18 months ago), and also a family history which includes schizophrenia. As a result, a lot of my anxiety at the moment is me worrying that certain behaviours or situations will make my mental health issues get worse again, or even precipitate a psychotic break.
One of the things I have convinced myself will "cause" me to develop schizophrenia is lack of social contact. What happened is that late last year, I read an article saying that if you are in a risk group for schizophrenia, it is important to have social contact as it can reduce the risk of having a psychotic episode, and also that social withdrawal is a sign that you might be about to have one.
As a result, when I decided to move from a sharehouse into a studio flat after getting a full-time job, I developed some anxious thoughts that this (living alone/wanting own place) was either an indication that I was about to have a psychotic episode, or could actually cause one. Now with the lockdowns, I obviously have very little social life, and am worried that I could go crazy.
At night I feel scared, or don't like it to be quiet, or get scared of shadows, or have broken sleep with bad dreams (usually related to coronavirus, e.g. being sick and taken to hospital but the "hospital" is actually a conference centre, etc). But then I worry that not sleeping enough, having weird dreams, feeling scared at night, or doing something odd (e.g. mindlessly brushing my teeth when I walk into the bathroom) are not normal for an adult and am signs that I am "losing my mind", or, more concretely, am about to have a psychotic episode.
Is this normal, is there any way to stop it, and does it indicate that the stress might be causing me to have a psychotic episode?
