From experience to understanding : meaning-making and recovery in psychotic experiences

Background Psychotic experiences have long been dominated by the biomedical framework, while comparatively less attention has been paid to their subjective meaning and the ways in which experiences are organized throughout long-term recovery. This study aimed to explore how a lived-experience researcher came to understand and organize psychotic experiences through sustained writing practices.Methods This study employed a longitudinal analytic autoethnographic approach, drawing upon over 700,000 words of lived-experience narratives and writing archives accumulated by the researcher across 25 years. Through ongoing writing, comparison, and conceptual analysis, key experiential themes were identified and refined.Results Three interrelated experiential dimensions were identified: Vulnerability Traits, Mirror Thinking, and Non-Realistic Demands. Under conditions of stress and meaning-related dilemmas, these dimensions gradually formed a subjectively coherent experiential structure. Writing played a significant role in the organization of experience, self-reflection, and meaning integration.Discussion This study proposes a phenomenologically oriented interpretive pathway, grounded in lived experience. The findings suggest that certain psychotic experiences may serve specific psychological organizing functions in particular contexts. Writing functioned not only as a mode of expression, but also as a process through which experience was understood and integrated, thereby offering an experiential contribution to recovery-oriented practice.