friendlione

Hi,
If she sees any doctor, not a psychiarist. They medicalize normal human mental cycles. An effective psychologist is good, though, experienced in helping post traumatic syndrome.

I don't believe your friend is crazy, and I do believe she has extreme survivors' guilt, and self-doubt and sensitivity to her surroundings. But that she is not empathizing with or understanding herslf.

The mind uses symbols, which we then verbalize to mean whatever we figure out. Speech is faulty, but the mental symbols are normal and explain what we experience....IF we figure them out CORRECTLY, then we understand ourselves.
If we mistake the meanings, we can feel crazy and out of control, and can act crazy.

From my childhood trauma and an accident, I was also considered to be psychic by many people, and I also experienced disturbing reoccurring dreams through my childhood. I heard voices asking me things like, "why are YOU smiling?", and I was extremely self-conscious, with suicidal tendencies. I saw no outward reason why I would be like that.

A psychiatrist and other doctors offered me drugs, to "squelch" my psyche, which I tried for a time, then stopped taking because they had a numbing effect.

In my forties, I went into psychotherapy for all of this, and dealt with my childhood and the accident trauma, and still had dreams, but I started to try to understand the symbols in my mind. For instance, "people chasing me" became clearly the feeling of not having control over the adults that abused me, and many other symbols began to make sense.

A few years later, I even discovered where that "voice" came from...while showing my driver's license picture to my older brother, he said, there you are with that smirk! I was stunned, because I had merely tried to look pleasant with a smile for the picture. It turned out that he, being seven when I was born, was jealous and had thought when I smiled, that I was smirking at him for taking attention from him. How very sad that he felt so displaced and no one helped him with it, and that I took his reaction personally, as if there was something wrong with my very existence.

That is just part of the long story of things that affected me, to show you how things stored in the mind can be stirred up by trauma, and get all mixed up. But they can also be sorted out and put in their proper place in the mind, such as that she has the right to live as long as she can, even though someone else died.

From my own experience, that girl in your friend's mind could be herself, if she felt bad for being alive as a girl. I often saw myself as a child in my nightmares that became only dreams as I began to gain empathy for myself as a little girl.

Psychotherapy made all the difference for me, because my confusion was so entrenched. I am fine now, not self-destructive, but still very sensitive to what goes on around me, and I have hunches that seem psychic to other people. But I am not psychic, I am just very aware and I pay attention to details that most people don't notice.

I think your friend needs encouraged that she is not crazy, that though she was traumatized that she can recover. She will always be more sensitive to her surroundings, though, after that incident. That is normal for what she went through.
Don't allow her to continue to believe she is now somehow abnormal.