Category: psychosis

Mine Would Be You

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, depression, mood disorders, psychosis

Mine Would Be You

Listening to this song and thought it would be the title of this blog, for no reason other than Blake Shelton sings it.

I did my errands today and had therapy. We discussed the article that pissed me off last night (see previous blog for rant). She couldn’t believe the terms they had come with. She is anxious to read the paper on it. So I either will have to write it this weekend or sometime next week. Next week will be kind of difficult as I have appointments the beginning of the week. I would like to get it done tomorrow and then type it up at my leisure.

During therapy, I got the serious need for a nap. I could barely stay awake. After therapy, I lasted about an hour and then succumbed to a little rest period for about an hour. I wanted to sleep but I just couldn’t. Thoughts of what we talked about were swirling around my head. I told her about the mini flashback I had yesterday afternoon after I had written my blog for the day. Just writing about my experience cause some PTSD to happen. It wasn’t pleasant. But luckily my niece wanted to watch TV with me so it provided the distraction I needed. I told her that writing about my experiences when younger was going to be problematic and now she understood. I hope she doesn’t want me to pursue that line of writing again.

We talked about my upcoming birthday and how I am dreading it very much. I honestly don’t want to live to be that age. She doesn’t want me to kill myself like I would like to. I just feel like a loser because I thought I would have a career by now that I would enjoy. I thought I would also have my degree in something and I would be satisfied with that, even if that meant working in the lab the rest of my life. Nope, I had a breakdown in 2008 and have been scared to go back to college. I am scared because I really don’t want a psychotic break like I had. I ignored the psychosis so I could get things done for almost nine months. By the time the fall semester rolled around, I was in some deep psychosis that 4 mg of trilafon couldn’t handle. I forget what I was taking at the time or if it was the third hospitalization that abilify was introduced to combat the delusions and voices I was experiencing. I just know that what I was taking was not working and I was close to being put on clozapine to handle the psychosis. Stress at work and school were just too much. 2008 was a big year in my life. It was the first time that I had presented a poster at the American Association of Suicidology. I went to Barcelona, Spain with my research work group for a few days. It was so great to get that opportunity. So I couldn’t be taking drugs that affected my cognition. It was a surreal year. Unfortunately, it caused me considerable distress. It took a very long time, almost a year to get stabilized. Now I can’t go without those meds at all. I have tried to get off them but soon as I am off for a few weeks, the delusion and paranoia start up again.

Thank goodness my therapist didn’t want me to write to her while she was away this time. She said that she will be reading the material I sent her while she is gone. I was hoping she would have read the letter I sent her last week but she didn’t. I have a feeling the questions I asked her in that letter are going to remain unanswered.

upset, angry, and psychosis

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, depression, mood disorders, psychosis

Last night, I had an upsetting conversation with someone that I have known the past few months. She accused me of “needing help” and that I strung her along, when I ignored her messages the last few weeks. I had done so because the last time we chatted, she was in crisis. She wanted to cut herself and was seeking my assistance to stop herself. Apparently, I wasn’t enough, despite the measures of DBT and self-soothing. I told her that if she did cut, we couldn’t be friends anymore. It was just too stressful for me and I have my own problems. That must have worked for about five minutes and then she cut. I told her goodbye and thought that was the last of I would hear from her. I was wrong. She kept telling me “people were talking about my book negatively” and that she was “trying to stick up on my behalf’. I have no idea what she was talking about. I belong to the same groups she does and have not seen one post about my book in months. So I asked another CES friend if he had heard of any scuttle butt in the groups and he hadn’t. At that point, I was fed up. I kindly wrote to her and said I didn’t know what she was talking about but please don’t contact me any further. I said I needed to work on myself and that I would be no use to anyone if I didn’t. She comes back saying all this bullshit, like we have been going around and around for months, saying she hasn’t “needed my help at all for ages”. Then she blocked me so I couldn’t respond. What a fucking bitch loser she is. She got me so damn upset and angry. I told my friend, who referred her to me, that she isn’t to send people my way who have attempted suicide, again. I tried to help her but there was no way I could. I am not a trained professional, least not yet.

I discussed this with my therapist, who was happy that I am no longer in contact with her. But because she blocked me and I didn’t, it always stands the chance she could be back. I should have blocked her when she sent me the third message asking for a response as to why I wasn’t responding. But I wanted to give her a response before I did, thinking this could end peacefully. I was wrong. If she reads this blog, maybe she can see things from my perspective but I doubt it. She only sees things her way and that has always been what she sees.

I have been so upset today that I didn’t do anything. I haven’t showered, so I didn’t go out. I just slept after my therapy appointment. She (therapist) got me going, too. She wants me to write about all my past psychotic experiences. I told her I would think about it but I am not going to put much effort into those that affected my childhood/teenage years. They are too triggering for me. I don’t remember when they started, either. I have been hearing voices since I was five. When the Smurfs were on TV, I thought they lived under my bed and each night I would talk to them before falling asleep. It all started off as imaginary friends. But as I grew older, they did too. I always have at least two voices that follow me where ever I go. Sometimes they are loud, sometimes they are not. Sometimes I don’t even know they are there. But I hear them all the time like the ebbs and flows of the water against the shore. Without them, I cannot function. They have been a part of my life so long that for them not to exist, I cannot cognitively function. I can’t think, my thoughts are slow, I can’t read. I can’t do anything. It’s a symbiotic relationship. I had to keep them quiet when others were around. I had to not speak when I was in school even though they were telling me what to do. And always criticizing me. The freeing moment came when I was hospitalized for the first time and I was diagnosed with psychotic depression. As we walked down the hall to another part of the emergency room, I started talking with myself. I figured there was no way to stop it. I was already diagnosed. My mother thought I lose my mind when I started a conversation with myself. She said to stop, as it made it look like I was “crazy”. I will never forget the shame in her voice. I wasn’t talking in another language or anything. But I was freaking out because it was my first hospitalization and I was being sent to god knows where. I hated the first hospital I went to. Then I was transferred to another nicer hospital. My cousin said that all I had to do was to sign the three day paper to get myself out. But I didn’t want out. I needed help and the hospital was it. I didn’t want to be depressed anymore. But I needed my voices. They had stopped with medication and I was so lonely. I skipped a dose but back then, they had ways of making you take your meds. If you couldn’t take them orally, they would inject them into you. So I always took my meds. I was compliant. The voices got mad if I talked about them, so I always had a hushed tone when I spoke about them. But one day while I was still inpatient, I found my thoughts were numb. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t do anything. It made me sadder. Then the docs took me off the meds and things went back to “normal”. I knew from then on, I couldn’t talk about the voices to anyone and denied having them. They weren’t causing me harm, then. I always had a sense of paranoia and being watched. There was only one medication that ever really helped with that and that was olanzapine. I loved this drug because it helped me so much. Unfortunately, my pdoc didn’t because it had the risk of diabetes in people with a history of diabetes in their families. My mother is a diabetic. So I had to say goodbye to this drug. It was a long while before I was put on my current med, abilify.

“Haylor”

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, depression, mood disorders, psychosis

“Haylor”

I have been trying to write for most of the day but I have been coming up empty. It all started while reading my blogs a few weeks ago and came across a blog entry about a psychotic episode. It happened the beginning of November 2012. I don’t remember it at all but I wrote about it, briefly. Like a few sentences each blog entry. I even tried to see if I wrote about it in my journal and came up with the same thing, nothing. Voldemort was my “best friend” and all conversation ended there. So I have been trying to fill in the blanks but I am not a bullshit artist. I wrote a few sentences more to make the paper 300 words. That was all that this episode amounted to. I really would love to expand this but I have nothing to go on. I even tried writing to my therapist about my difficulties hoping it would spark something and I would get something on paper, but alas, nothing. I just wrote the difficulty of writing and that was all. What I did learn through looking at my old journal was what set off the psychosis, which is interesting. I apparently misplaced my 8GB thumb drive and it was causing me considerable panic. In normal people, they would have a panic attack and that would be it. Not me. I became psychotic and apparently it took the form of Voldemort’s tweets to set me off. I wasn’t taking my anti-psychotic medicine at the time so I was more vulnerable. Losing this thumb drive was my life. Every suicide research article I ever read was on this drive as well as my papers on the subject. It would have been a huge loss and I was just sick with worry. But I did find the stupid thing. It was hidden under some papers and my “life” was saved. I made a few copies of it just so in case I misplaced it again, I would have it.

I did considerable research into trying to find out what the episode was about and if I wrote more about it. I still came up empty. Apparently Voldemort wrote a thing about Taylor Swift, calling her Haylor as she was dating a Harry at the time of the tweet. I have no idea what the last name of the Harry was. I am sure a Google search will probably yield it but I really don’t care. I tried looking back to his tweets from 2012 but they just went as far back as Jan 2013 and stopped there. I was so close to getting what I needed. He was active on his account but slowly tampered off. No wonder I was becoming so paranoid and thinking he was “tweeting me personally”. He would tweet several times a day. And now it’s every few days. Reading over the tweets weren’t triggering for me because I had no recollection of the psychotic episode. The only proof that I have of its existence is my blog and what little I wrote in my journal, which was only three sentences. For the days that I was psychotic, I didn’t write or blog. I probably was too incapacitated. If the psychosis had commanding voices/tones, I probably was too paranoid to put pen to paper for fear of being persecuted. And the last thing you want to do is piss off is a dark wizard. He might have been make believe to everyone, but for a few days, he was real to me.

The reason I was interested in finding the tweet about Taylor was because he “made me” listen to her songs after the tweet. It usually doesn’t take much for me to listen to Taylor because she is my favorite artist, but the thought that someone on Twitter made me listen was curious. Apparently he had tweeted something from her video “Story of Us”. The only thing I remember was Snape telling the students to turn to page 394, like it did in the Harry Potter book. Whether that was where “Haylor” came from (Harry + Taylor=Haylor), I am at a loss. I couldn’t find the tweet and I didn’t write more about it, which further piques my curiosity about this episode. I had written that my therapist was concerned about my losing reality so this was serious. Of course, any time I become psychotic my therapist panics. I have no idea if my pdoc was concerned because I didn’t write about that. I didn’t go into the hospital so I am guessing the medication helped and I didn’t need further assistance. I think finding the drive relieved some of the anxiety to help the medication work. And once it did, the delusions, paranoia, and voices were gone. He also was “talking to me”, though it was all mumbled according to what I wrote it. Usually voices are mumbled but I can “sense” what they mean.

The reason this is all fascinating to me is because I am such a Harry Potter fan. I have read each book at least three times and am currently read each on another time. I have seen all the movies, which were a little disappointment as they cut things from the book or added things that didn’t occur in the book. I also follow the Dark Lord on Twitter as well as Snape. Snape’s account is wicked funny. But for whatever reason, didn’t have the same psychotic hold on me as the Dark Lord’s. I think because Voldemort’s tweets were really commanding tweets than funny in nature. I am sure the tweets were meant in jest, but for whatever reason, I took them seriously, at the time. There was also a tweet saying to rob houses of Twilight freaks that saw the movie when it came out back then. I had written that I wanted to steal my sister’s sweets and Halloween candy as I knew she would be at the movie. That is probably funny now but it wasn’t then. In seriousness, I was in deep turmoil of acting on a tweet because I was “commanded” to. It was troubling me. I honestly have no clue why I wasn’t in the hospital. All the previous times that I ever had commanding voices, I was inpatient. I must have seriously have had the confidence of my psychiatrist that I wasn’t a harm to myself or others. But then, it was just a few short days and like I said, medication helped tremendously that I have no recollection of these events as they played out. I usually do remember my delusions because they last so long or I am really convinced things are happening as my mind is playing them out. Maybe because I didn’t land in the hospital I don’t remember these delusions and commanding voices/tweets. I wrote that Voldemort was “personally talking to me”, which I can only mean that his tweets were personal. But that is probably because I had his tweets sent to my mobile phone so it acted as a text message to me. In my delusional mind, it was meant for me, and me only.

A Lot of Walking Today

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, depression, Paranoia, psychosis

Lot of walking today

I finally got my new glasses today. And again it took two trips to the store. I should have stayed in the Square because when I got to my home square, the place called me saying the second pair was ready. Now I can see without straining my eyes. I love the sunglasses. They are just dark enough, the way I like it. But to get there and to do an errand, I did a lot of walking and stair climbing. My ankle really hates me right now. I will probably pay the price later tonight. Walking to my friend’s place was longer than I remembered. And he didn’t tell me his office was on the 3rd floor. Bugger. But I did my good deed for the day.

It was really hot out today. I was a sweaty mess by the time I came home. I am going to have to shower. I am glad I didn’t before I went out. I hate when you take a shower and then become all hot and sweaty and need another one.

I had therapy today. I don’t remember too much about what was said. I am very tired from my exertions. My legs feel like rubber. We did talk about my blog for a little bit and about writing a second book. This lady thinks I can just produce books like they were going out of style. It’s been a year since my first book. And I am slowly working on my second. It’s just hard when you feel like killing yourself every fucking day of your life. It’s like why bother. I was hit with an idea for another short story. I got as far as a title and that was it. The title is the character in the book. I haven’t decided how I am going to write it. And I still don’t know if I will be infringing on rights of the Stargate show by writing this story. I might just publish it on my blog, though, just so I don’t collect a cent from it, just in case.

I am very tired and I hope that I sleep tonight, till at least eight tomorrow morning. I am so sick of waking up before six most mornings. It’s just a really long day, especially when I can’t go back to sleep. I go to bed late to try and stave off waking up early but it doesn’t matter. Once I have my few hours of sleep, I am up. I honestly don’t remember the last time I slept for at least six hours straight.

Last night, I had a trigger. My delusions are back and so are the damn voices, and not my usual kind. I might end up in the hospital this go round, if things don’t improve. I am really paranoid today. On the way home, the bus was getting full and I just felt like everyone’s eyes were on me. I couldn’t wait for my stop to get off the bus. Because I am feeling psychotic, the new book I wanted to read, “Lethal Code”, I am holding off. It has to deal with conspiracy and cyber wars. Not a book I should be reading right now, even though it may seem like a benign book. I just don’t want to become more delusional than I already am. I know the trigger for me was talk about Islam or ISIS or both. I don’t remember what exactly set me off. I know I was talking to my friend Chris about the delusions on Friday and maybe that wasn’t a good idea because I am still convinced the leaders of the ISIS group are being controlled by aliens. And they want Americans so they can behead them. I am very scared that this might happen with an invasion in our country.