I don't know anything about how to communicate with people experiencing psychotic episodes myself, but one time some speakers who have schizophrenia came to give a talk to my sociology class, and they said that if somebody is experiencing a hallucination, it's best not to try to convince them that what they are seeing isn't really there, because having their experience denied just makes them even more frightened. Instead, they said to neither affirm nor try to refute their hallucinations, and ask them questions about how they are feeling instead of what they are perceiving.
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