My minor experiences with psychosis

Here's my own experience with psychosis. Like I said before, I'm bipolar 'with psychotic features'. This just means that there are tiny things here and there which don't fit nicely into the definition of a mood disorder. I have had one 'episode' which was caused by a sudden stoppage in a medication but nothing serious apart from that. But all the same it would be elucidating to share.

Read on!






For a long time since I was little I heard the sound of a crowd inside my head whenever it was very quiet (usually at night). I thought it was just your brain remembering that you were in a crowd that day and it just kept playing the sound over and over. It also sounded sometimes like someone had left the radio on in the house (many times I remember going into Mum and Dad's room and asking if they had forgotten to turn it off).

All this stuff I just thought was normal, and it was never enough to be a problem. But there were other things that I took as normal which in hindsight caused some issues.

When under stress I had a great deal of difficulty organising my thoughts. They were there alright, but they were always sort of 'out of reach'. Last year I went to my psychiatrist and told him about it, and he put me on Abilify, a typical antipsychotic. Yay! My thoughts were all of a sudden immensely clear! This made me realise that this was actually how things were meant to be, 20 years too late!

The drug has a very annoying side effect, though. I couldn't sit still at all. Every cell in my body had to be moving all the time. Zeldox was next in line, which had its problems as well. A stupid doctor told me to stop it immediately which put me into a full-on psychotic episode.

I have very little memory of those 2 days. It was nothing harmful, more entertaining to be honest. In this sense I was extremely lucky. It started when in the middle of a conversation I piped up with "No, David Gilmour lent Roger Waters his Telecaster for the recording of Dogs!" (this isn't even true...)

 I don't remember this but that night I kept my Mum and brother up babbling incoherently. Highlights included:

- (policeman's voice) "Have you been shoplifting?"
- "Well, you haven't gone far in the game if you don't know about Darth Revan..."
- "The holy book is cryptic"

During those two days I constantly saw a figure in the corner of my eye. I thought it was a person, and heaps of times I opened my mouth to speak to him/her/it but realised that no one was there. I talked to my cats when they weren't there and apparently saw a dog run through the house. Walking to uni there was an old lady in black in front of me. I stopped to tie my shoelace and when I looked up... she was gone! (cue X-Files music)

As I said before, this was a harmless episode which was caused by a sudden stoppage in drugs. It is funny, for sure. But it is a nice way of remembering that most other people are not as lucky. Psychotic episodes can be extremely dangerous to sufferers and sometimes to the people around them.

I think that this kind of illness is severely neglected in the national dialogue and as such deserves a significantly more thorough education program to help friends and employers understand that people with psychosis are severely ill and need to be treated with compassion.