schizophrenia

Thanks for the update! Just to acknowledge a positive, you seem pretty trusting of people on Lemmy 🙂

I hope the dose adjustment works out well. It doesn't sound like your psychiatrist answered your question about how to recognize improvements in 'persecutory delusions'. I'll try to offer a few thoughts. For some conditions and people, they may be able to assess whether their condition is improving just off the top of their heads (e.g., how often they've been using/ filling prescriptions for as-needed pain medication). Otherwise and/or for higher-quality data, daily logging is helpful, and there are different ways you could log. You could for example rate how much you felt "people are potting against you" or have other doubt of people on a 0-10 scale each day (same time of day ideally, like before bed or after school), where 0 is no concern at all and 10 is as bad as it could be or has been. Instead of a daily 'symptom rating' log, you could log the occurrence of relevant thoughts or behaviours. You could log whenever you think someone is plotting against you - who was it, what was happening, what time of day was it, how did you respond. This kind of log might help you identify particular situations where you're susceptible to feeling like people are plotting against you - eg, maybe it's more common with the same sex or with the opposite sex, or teachers vs other students - etc. That info could be helpful for understanding and working through challenging situations. Of course, recommending logging is like recommending exercise: an important aspect is to do choose something you have a reasonable chance of following through on (i.e., it's not too effortful).

I'm trying to reduce my cannabis and beer consumption. For the last month I've been logging how much of each I consume a day. It provides pretty objective data of whether I'm trending in the right direction, and how quickly. It also sensitizes me to factors that help increase/decrease my consumption (e.g., anxiety, how well or stressful school is going), because I log the date (I use a spreadsheet to enter the data) and have a column for comments as well (e.g., "slept like crap").

I hope some of my rambling is useful. It sounds like you're making progress, so good on you and keep going! :)