Psychosis Support
Support for Families Navigating Psychosis, Schizophrenia, and Bipolar Mania
When someone you love is living with psychosis, schizophrenia, or bipolar mania, you may be navigating a parallel, largely invisible experience. You may be exhausted, scared, grieving, confused. This work is for you.
I offer therapy specifically for parents, partners, siblings, and adult children of someone with a psychotic or mood disorder. This isn't family therapy for the person with schizophrenia, it's a dedicated space for the people around them, who are carrying their own confusion, loss, and vigilance. We’ll focus on understanding how psychosis shows up in your relationship and create a framework that supports you and the systems you are a part of.
I work from your family's existing strengths, cultural context, and values to help you translate that strength into sustainable, informed action. This work blends resourcing and nervous system regulation, skill-building, communication strategies for engaging a family member with limited insight into their symptoms, safety planning, and an emphasis on sustainability.
This work is clinically and personally informed by my work in high-acuity psychiatric settings, where I work closely with individuals with schizophrenia and collaborate regularly with psychiatric nurse practitioners and psychiatrists to deliver research-backed and evidence-based care.
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Psychotic symptoms and manic episodes can look different from person to person, and they rarely announce themselves clearly.
I help you build a working understanding of what's happening neurologically and psychologically for your family member: positive symptoms (hallucinations, delusions), negative symptoms (flattened affect, withdrawal, loss of motivation), cognitive symptoms, and mood dysregulation
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There’s no clear before-and-after, just an ongoing sense of loss for who this person was, or who you thought they'd become, alongside the person who is still very much here and still loved. Therapists sometimes call this ambiguous loss: grief that has no closure because the loss isn't final.
We make room to mourn without requiring you to resolve it.
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Many parents and partners live in a near-constant state of scanning for changes in sleep and appetite, medication adherence, and risky behaviors.
We work on recognizing the burnout in your body, building in recovery time and finding ways to stay attentive without staying in a constant state of hypervigilance.
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We look at how the illness is moving through the whole family system, not just how it's affecting the primary caregiver.
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Understanding diagnosis, treatment options, medication realities (including why adherence is often genuinely complicated, not simply a matter of willpower or insight), the role of stress, and what research actually says can be deeply stabilizing. Clear information reduces the space that fear and speculation tend to fill.