Category: mental illness

1 March

Psychosis is a funny beast. It terrorizes you, yet when it’s gone, you miss it. It stimulates you like nothing else can. Yet it’s a completely individual experience. No two people will ever have the same type of voices/hallucinations. These voices/hallucinations can be visual or auditory or both. Such a common ailment in mental illness, yet so different in people.

You can have command hallucinations that tell you to do stuff or tell you to harm yourself. Or have other voices that tell you are great and powerful. Others that are more sinister and mean that cause paranoia. It doesn’t have to be people, per se, that give these commands. It can be words from the TV or voices on the radio, even if the appliances are turned off and unplugged. These devices can still speak and it can cause great anxiety and nervous agitation.

Sometimes when I am reading a book, the words will fly off the page giving me new meaning. It is magical and majestic. Most of the time, a man’s voice “reads” to me. It is the only way I can comprehend the paragraphs. Without this voice, the words have no meaning and I don’t know what the book is trying to say. The words are empty and meaningless.

There was a time when my paranoid thoughts got the best of me while I was at work. I was utterly convinced my email was being monitored by a doctor colleague I had a row with. Well, not really a row. He just called me incompetent. I told my boss that I didn’t want to work with him again. In retaliation, he was “watching” my email activity to get me fired. Every email was tagged to him somehow. I was convinced of this because the voices said so. When the emails started doing their dance like the words of the book, I became nervous that something was wrong. I called my psychiatrist. She told me I needed to be in the hospital. Psychosis such as this required urgent care. But I did not feel sick. I may have felt a little insane, perhaps. The delusions and hallucinations were bad that year. It caused me to quit college. I have yet to return to university, but mostly that is because of financial reasons than psychosis.

Soon after my release from the hospital, the delusions started again. This time with another co-worker. Voices had me convinced she was out to kill me. We had been good friends. I talked amicably to her so not to offend her. We played this game for three weeks. With each passing day, the paranoia got worse. I finally asked this woman, to test my reality, if she intended to harm me. She thought it was a preposterous question. The voices lied, again. They always do but they are so convincing, you believe them. No one else hears them. They are never visible though I often imagine what they must look like. A general overview of a female or male voice. It is when they start arguing amongst each other that things become confusing. Sometimes they make sense, other times they are incoherent. It’s like they get weird languages so I can’t follow what they are saying. The language is not any that I can discern. I have been exposed to different languages over the years and this is like nothing I have heard before. The language they speak, however undiscernible, is alien to me. And when I question what they are saying, only then do they talk English again.

These voices have been a part of my life for more than thirty years. I have adapted to them well. Only time they ever really leave me is when I am highly medicated. When they leave, I am utterly alone. It is a lonely place to be in. I cannot think without the voices. They have become so ingrained to my thoughts. They can “read” my thoughts so I don’t have to speak, at times. Yet we do have conversations that either I will initiate or they will. Especially at night when I try going to sleep, is when they come out and talk. There is this one voice that pops in just when I am trying to sleep just to have a chat. This voice inquires how my day went, and other general questions relating to how I have been. This is usually because it has been a while since we last chatted. It’s annoying because I want to sleep, not talk. Yet if I ignore the voice, the louder she becomes. Then I can’t sleep because I get agitated and extremely annoyed. There is no arguing with these voices. They don’t have a sense of time like we do. If they talk and ask questions, they must be answered, no matter what time of day it is. Many nights of lost sleep mean nothing to them. They are demanding creatures of the night.

I read a quote today that stuck with me. “I never understood the ‘psychosis isn’t illness, just an expected response to stress’ line. Bleeding is an expected response to a cut”. Alex Langford. What strike me with this quote is that it is true. People who have stress do not become psychotic. They usually suffer from anxiety of some sort, but they don’t become delusional and hear/see things that others cannot see.

Like most of my psychotic episodes, stress is usually the precipitant factor. Two weeks ago, I was getting stressed over financial matters. I am on a fixed income so trying to pay for everything can be a juggling act. A delusion of command tweets started. We have had heavy snow the whole month of February. I kept getting tweets to clear the roof tops. With each subsequent tweet, I took it as a command to clean my roof off. I started worrying that my roof was going to collapse (highly unlikely as I don’t have flat roof tops). But I couldn’t shake the notion that something terrible was going to happen if I ignored the tweet. So I started taking one of my PRNs (as needed) medication. It helped to ease the agitation and helped me to see that I was safe in my home. But taking this medication caused the voices to go away, temporarily. I have never felt so empty and alone before. I could function, do my every day things, but it was eerily quiet in my room, and in my head.

Not everyone who has stress becomes psychotic. If stress was the reason, there would be more schizophrenics or those suffering from psychotic depressions or manias in the world. Most people who are stressed, as I stated before, have anxiety. I become psychotic for reasons I don’t know why. I start having conversations with myself, out loud, with the voices when I am stressed. It just looks like I am talking with myself, but I am really not. I do know that once I am on medication, the stresses don’t bother me as much and I can handle them better. I sometimes like to think of myself as a functional schizophrenic.

It’s hard to explain the voices as they can be random. They come out more when I am tired, stressed out, or overwhelmed. They also come out when I am in an agitated state. I also feel like I am losing my mind. I wonder, am I depressed? Am I manic? Or am I just mad, bordering on insanity?

My drug of choice when I am in an agitated state is trilafon (perphenazine). It helps to keep the “bad” voices away. The “bad” voices are the voices that tell me negative things, give me paranoia, start with the delusions, and give me commands. If they are not controlled by medication, I usually end up in the hospital.

These days, the “bad” voices don’t come around much since I take a regular anti-psychotic everyday. What is striking is that this pill has no effect on my “regular” voices, the voices that I hear every day. This is good because without these voices I cannot function. Although these regular voices can be annoying, critical, and negative, they can also be helpful to sort out problems or have discussions with.

Pain and despair can also bring about a psychotic episode for me. Physical pain is the not the kind that I am talking about. It’s more like a weight on the chest, making breathing difficult. It’s not like an anxiety attack upon the nerves that I sometimes get. It is more cerebral in nature but hurts like that of a broken limb. Despair will cause madness to intensify and with it comes the suicidal thoughts. Anguish also is felt like never felt before. It is unbearable. The combination of these feelings create a breeding ground for the voices to become unhinged. Delusions of persecution also become acute. I feel everyone is against me and are trying to kill me. I try to fight the rightness of the mind but it unthinkable. My thoughts are just too incoherent. Voices get their way and the insufferable feelings fuel the paranoia. The pressure to resist is futile and to cognitively deny their words proves to be impossible. The torment continues with the increase in despair and suffering of unbearable psychological pain.

In this state, lyrics of songs become perturbed and twisted. The meaning of songs always revolve around death and destruction, even if that is not what the song is about. Hallucinations of hearing the song over and over even when music is not playing is common. I hear the song even when the MP3 player or radio is silent. I once had a song by Pearl Jam run rampant in my head for weeks. Then the lyrics changed and were telling me that I had to die, even though there were no such lyrics in the song. There was no escape from this turmoil. The only place I found solace was in the hospital and being drugged up to calm my overstimulated brain.

These types of voices, paranoia, and delusions respond best to medication. The longer I go without meds, the worse my condition becomes. I deteriorate, losing whatever faculties I may still possess. I have noticed that as I get older, there is an increase in episodes. These episodes are profoundly devastating and scary. It used to be I could be on my medication until the episode passed. Then I would stop it and not have another episode for years. That doesn’t seem to be the case any longer. I must now take this pink pill every day to be sane and prevent symptoms from happening. Since this regimen began a couple of years ago, my psychotic symptoms have decreased. But if I skip a few days, I am in trouble again. Then it is harder to be back in control of the symptoms. The balance of dealing with the psychosis is never easy. It’s a fine line between sane and insane, despair and despondency, psychache, severe depression, and suicidal thoughts. These are the evil conundrums that medication cannot cure or control. Talk therapy is somewhat effective but only as a maintenance. Despair is its own miserable evil that sucks the light out of every window. It’s power cannot be underestimated.