My Psychosis

Psychosis (from the Greek "psyche", for mind/soul, and osis", for abnormal condition) means abnormal condition of the mind, and is a generic psychiatric term for a mental state involving a "loss of contact with reality."

To pinpoint exactly when my episode started, is to ask myself the question ‘when did I become out of touch with reality?’ However as the very nature of reality is subjective, this proves to be a difficult question to answer.

In November 2009 I completed a very intensive full time, one-year transpersonal art therapy course that involved a lot of personal, emotional and spiritual work. When I graduated I was suddenly left with not a lot of structure in my life and lots of ‘where to next?’ questions. I continued to do lots of self-reflection, spiritual and creative work at the time and was getting quite into exploring my sexual energy. I was doing lots of ecstatic dance, writing every day, doing breath work and I had quite a few intense kundalini experiences to the point I would often move into spontaneous full-body ecstatic orgasmic states. Beginning in 2010 I can see my boundaries melting away quite significantly, I was pushing myself and opening up to some pretty full on energies and emotions and experiencing varied altered states of consciousness. There were no drugs involved with my experiences.

After my 22nd birthday in April, I spent 4 or 5 days out in the hills at a house with my friend. Over that period, we both moved into quite a lot of very intense and ritual space without a lot of what I refer to as ‘containment’. I see this happening a few times for me in the months leading up to the episode – I would find myself in very powerful, spontaneous ritual-like spaces but without the safety of an acknowledgment of a 'beginning middle and end' to contain the experience and keep me grounded. Throughout history, whenever people practice magic of any kind, there is acknowledgement of moving into an altered state separate from the identity.  Then when complete, coming back to an ordinary waking state of consciousness in order to function in the 'real world.'  All the boundaries between others and myself were continuing to melt and I started to see the pattern and the meaning in EVERYTHING. There was synchronicity everywhere in my life and it was very beautiful.

After a while, I ended up back at my family home and decided to take a vow of silence in order to understand my family more deeply and my place there, I felt extremely psychic at this time. I experienced feelings of complete possession by a darker entity - where I would be typing on the keyboard and words were flying out of fingers out of my control and not from ‘me’ For one week I barely ate any food and would stay up all night with my body and mind-racing full of creative ideas and thoughts, but I had no channels or structure for this creativity, I would fill pages and pages with writing and even ended up writing on the walls. I dressed up in lots of outfits and felt extremely invigorated, sensitive, inspired and free. I would occasionally go for drives at 3 in the morning, everything was poetic and powerful and I was definitely in a manic state. Eventually I reached a point where the magic flipped, I started to feel very disturbed, my thoughts turned to extreme paranoia, anxiety, hallucinations and delusions particularly around my family and messages from dead relatives, a lot of death and very archetypal images moving through me.  I felt desperately that I needed to be in nature and had the image of being at the beach and being supported by one male and one female to move through the experience with me, however I was unable to attain this due to being all over the place and too scattered to clearly state what I wanted, to the people I knew could give this to me and not be afraid. As human beings we are petrified of madness.

My parents were very concerned and I too knew something was up, so I agreed to go to the doctor, The day of the appointment I started freaking out and didn’t want to go, my parents didn’t know what to do so I got locked in the car and taken  to the emergency room where we waited for 7 hours before I was seen to by a psychiatrist (not the best environment for someone who is experiencing psychotic symptoms!) I knew as we drove up to the hospital that my journey into the mental health system had begun – As part of my course I had studied the medical model and psychosis in particular and knew that there was absolutely no room in the western mental health system for anything other than medication. My mental state was now about to be completely disregarded for being anything other than a chemical imbalance in the brain that needed to be fixed and forgotten.  I knew as I walked through the hospital doors that there was no way my experience was going to valued and held and nurtured from then on,  that once you are in, it’s one hell of a ride to get out. When I was finally seen that night, the doctor sent me home, where I then started receiving visits from the CAT (Crisis Assessment Team) team every night, who monitored my behaviour and tried to give me medication which I was very resistant to at first but knew it was best to remain voluntary and not be given a community treatment order against my will, so i obliged . Regardless, I was still able to stay up all night even with strong antipsychotic tranquilizers but I was more trying to prove a point in fighting them. so I eventually I allowed the medication to work.  During this time I had started my period and was bleeding extremely heavily. (More than ever before) I did not want to wear any clothes and felt extremely wild and raw. I began on medication during my period and since then have researched the link between menstruation and psychosis – Apparently there are current studies at the Alfred hospital exploring this link between menstruation and madness, which I am very interested in. Psychotic PMT, so to speak.

As I was not really getting better at home, I ended up going to a residential setting for a week however I was still a bit off the planet so I ended up going to a psych hospital for 12 days. I was diagnosed with first episode psychosis and I accepted a regular average dose of anti-psychotic medication. The doctors were continually asking to up my dosage, trying to pin me with bi-polar disorder and offering me a powerful mood stabilizer – Lithium, but I constantly refused all of the above, we do to some extent have power in accepting the labels that someone wants to give us. I felt my feelings of sadness; anger and grief were completely normal considering I was in a psych ward! I knew I was an extremely expressive and emotional person and had been my whole life, but when you are in the mental health system any display of emotion which may be completely acceptable in a social/creative environment, becomes the potential for a diagnosis and more medication. Psych wards are awful places for recovery and are extremely intense environments with people who are tapping in to all sorts of universal energies, it’s almost like the patients psychic channels have opened, but the material is all shattered, scattered and clouded with their own crap. Lots of very strange things happen in those places. I eventually started to get better, a mix between medication and what felt like me deciding I had seen enough. I got a sense that I could stay there forever if I wanted to, but decided to answer questions and behave the way I was meant to and move on. I lived in the residential setting for another month before coming home again.

Because I had studied psychosis and the mental health system, there was often a witness part of me, an educated part of me that was studying myself, studying the system and the people around me like an experiment in a petri dish, fascinated, watching the doctors and the way they dealt with my illness, knowing what I was going through, but not being able to do a whole lot about it. I still to this day wonder what would have happened if I had gotten myself to nature, been nourished with good food and supported by people who were able to hold and not be afraid of where I was at, what would have happened if I was allowed to move through all and come out the other end naturally? In the beginning I would try to express to the doctors that I felt I was having psychic experiences but soon realized this was a very bad idea and to keep quiet about that. The doctors would always ask me if I felt I had special powers of any kind. I knew that of course I did – we all did! But you learn to answer the questions the way you have to get out and be considered ‘normal’ again. It’s an amazing experience to try and prove your sanity and navigate your way out of the system, I am an intense person naturally, and many of us are a little ‘mad’ particularly the creative types, but you’ve got to play the sane game to get out of there.

The symbolic content of my psychosis was quite specific and the experience is still unravelling in regards to the nature of the hallucinatory material and where it came from– with some very strange things actually coming true or revealing their meaning months later! For example, I believed at one point that I was on a reality television show, and a few months after my psychosis had ended I was actually on a real reality show for foxtel ha that was a trip. Some of it still doesn’t make sense and I have no idea where it came from and maybe it never will. More will be revealed..

I am currently on a small amount of medication and will be off it completely in a month and out of the mental health system (as a client) for what I hope is for good! I have learnt so much from my experience and feel I have so much more insight into the psyche of myself and humans in general. I know this experience will continue to shape my life and my interests for years to come as it is such a rich and complex experience that I continue to have insights about. I believe people who have mental illnesses are often extremely creative, sensitive brilliant individuals with so much to offer but in the western world we do not yet have a framework for people who are not like ‘everyone else’  I feel passionate about working in mental health now and supporting people going through similar experiences, I am currently applying for support worker jobs in mental health. I am commencing university to study psychology, drama and film and am more fascinated in learning about the brain and doing my own research in the future as well as possibly working on further creative projects related to psychosis, in particular my own experience.

I am a massive advocate for people sharing their experiences of mental illness! I was frequently told by various professionals to keep my experience to my self which I believe just encourages the stigma. Shout it out!