Tag: psychotic break

Have Faith in Yourself

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One may expect nothing good coming from completely losing one’s mind to madness, and dealing with the aftermath. I often heard the cliches about how I would be a stronger person as a result and I would learn so much through these experiences. However, looking back, those words of encouragement only spoke of the beginning of what I gained resulting from embarking on the recovery process.

I did a little bit of reflecting in my journal this evening about what I have lost and gained over the past fourteen years, since I was diagnosed with bipolar I following a psychotic break.

Here’s a small list of profound losses I experienced within the past fourteen years:

  • My physical health and good looks
  • My religion, which was a foundation of my life
  • My spirituality
  • My sense of identity
  • My sharp intellect and ability to learn new things went into remission
  • At a couple points, I lost my mind completely
  • My ability to adequately care for myself and my environment

I still struggle hard with my physical health and my ability to adequately care for myself. However, in the past fourteen years, I’ve regained much about the other items on the list.

So, not only have I gained back most of the above list of losses, I’ve found the following:

  • I’ve broken free from the institution of religion
  • I’ve broken the generational cycle of madness
  • I understand family and friends better
  • I’ve learned who I am and what I need to explore about myself
  • I’ve embarked on the road to recovery from severe verbal abuse and isolation growing up
  • I’ve discovered some things never go away, such as my analytic mind
  • I’ve confirmed my passion for writing
  • I’ve found wisdom and a new way of seeing the world
  • I can explore a rich spiritual identity and experiences

During recovery, there are seasons and there are trends. It was pitch black for many years of my life. I had therapy nearly every week for 9 months after my first episode, often focusing on the reasons why I shouldn’t commit suicide. All seasons of recovery present their challenges. Over time, the light becomes brighter, and during the seasons, this light will fluctuate.

However, just know that the deeper my pain, the deeper my loss, the more constitutive my loss… the deeper character I gain, the more I find, and the more cohesive I become as a result of these experiences. I’ve reached a point where I have become someone that is beyond my wildest dreams or imaginations, compared to fourteen years ago.

I’m at a brightly blossoming point in my road to recovery. I still have a ways to go, but I’m making progress faster than I have ever before. The truth is… those cliche encouragements did help a little bit when I took them in good faith. The darker the valley, the harder it is to climb out and the longer it takes to climb out. I had faith in myself that I could get through when I was unable to call on God for help and no one could be there for me.

One thing is always true: have faith in yourself. No matter how bad it is, you can overcome.

-theothersid3

photo credit: Stuck in Customs Aurora Over The Valley via photopin (license)

The Living Dead

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If it’s worth anything, after going through those vivid psychotic experiences I went through, I found the other side is a wonderful place and it’s intricately connected to everything here, now.

It’s not a matter of who ends up there or who doesn’t… it just is. We’re all part of it, whether we know it or not.

One way I can describe such a perspective is waking up in a dream and having that become reality, being awake and asleep at the same time… becoming the living dead. The dream itself is nearly incomprehensible.

The living dead’s eyes are open and see what God allows them to see, never more than what we can handle.

-theothersid3

photo credit: Eyes Color via photopin (license)

Slippery Slope Into Darkness

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So, how does someone with severe bipolar appear to become psychotic out of the blue? Does one typically snap into a psychotic state or out of one?

The answer my therapist gave me is true to my experience: No. Psychosis is a long, slippery slope towards falling over the edge, and recovery is a long, gradual, up and down slope out of the pit for acute psychosis. The trick I found is to learn how to catch it earlier and earlier to the point where I can maintain and not have to worry about it happening anymore. A significant part of staying away from psychosis as someone with schizoaffective/bipolar I disorder is staying on my medication, no matter how unpleasant the side effects can be. I’ve had two psychotic breaks: first was when I was diagnosed twelve years ago and the second one five years later when I stopped my medications.

What are some general things that go through my head when I’m psychotic?

Fortunately, I do not experience anger or aggression for the most part towards anyone. The only way I can briefly describe it is that I feel like everything I can possibly conceive of is going through my head at the same time. It feels like I’m transported to a different reality, which is a wondrous new place, or hell depending on what episode I’m talking about. With all this information overload, little details begin to form more delusions: religion, personal, ideas, world events, and reality itself all become torn open and full of mysterious riddles.

While all this is going on in my head, what do other people see?

I remember leaving my physical body and conversing with other people around the ward, conversing with patients and staff, and visualizing unimaginable things. However, my hospital records document me sitting in my room those days scribbling away on papers about a girl I was obsessed with years ago at the time. I remember having glimpses of writing about her in what seems like my subconscious. True reality was a dream to me and I was living in a dream (the kind I have when I’m typically sleeping). I likened myself to the living dead at the time, awake and asleep at the same time. My friend also visited me in the ward and he later told me that he could see it in my eyes that sometimes I left and came back right in front of him. When I came back, he pleasantly said to me, “Welcome back!” Then we’d converse for a few more seconds before I returned to my psychosis trip. The same would happen with staff as well – I faded in and out and the staff were very excited to see me back when I came back, before fading again seconds or minutes later.

Another interesting note: as I fade in and out of reality, so to speak, what happens when I call someone on a cell phone? Well, I did… I called my friend, and I heard his voice loud and clear, then felt myself go to the other reality and all I heard was static coming through on my phone – with a full signal. I’d come back and hear his voice again, then fade away again. I wrote a post about this earlier.

I remember trying to tell myself and hearing other people tell me that all those experiences are in my head, and they may be. However, whether real or not, they are what they are. I’m not concluding that I merely sat in a room as an empty shell of a body working out my obsession with a girl in the hospital is the whole story of what happened there. There are many more precious experiences to be told.

Some day, I hope I can do justice to describing what it is like to go through a firsthand psychotic break. It’s like getting lost in a fractal without any reference points, then coming back out again and seeing everything so differently.

-theothersid3

photo credit: Wobble Walk via photopin (license)

Psychosis Needs to Steep.

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If I could do everything over again, I wish I had set aside my mission of interpreting my psychotic experiences aside for later to work on after I had recovered more. Think of it as allowing the fresh, immature flavors of the experience to steep for a while and come back in a truer form that turns into something remotely consumable.

A psychotic experience is inherently an experience so great that I can’t wrap my mind around it. As every month passes, I understand more of it, and every few years, my interpretation of it may completely shift in certain aspects of it. Not only can I not wrap my mind around it, I have no frame of reference within my experiences in real life to contain it or frame it or allow my mind to interpret it.

The stories of my psychotic experiences have taken years to unravel as much as they have and allowed me to start understanding them. I liken these stories to a fractal. I can zoom in on any part or aspect of it and it has a seemingly infinite number of interpretations and implications, no matter where I look, and I find myself getting lost in the beginning.

If I need to revisit my experiences before I’m ready to, I do it in two ways.

The first is to talk about it with people I trust, to vent and to describe to them what happened. This helps me expose some air to all those experiences I had.

The second way is to deal with them more in my journals. If I have problems obsessing about them, I write down the content in my journals, and develop a mental plan of action as to how I can ignore these thought patterns in the future and explain to myself why I need to do so. I need to focus on what is important, recovery, and deciphering fractals of psychotic experiences right after they happened is not the road to recovery. It only leads to more grief.

That being said, after I get to a point where I can handle doing so without triggering my bipolar symptoms, I find it helpful to write down snippets or stories in great detail of what happened during my episodes. This serves two purposes: 1. It helps provide a fresh look later on when I reflect on my journals and look to see and remember what actually happened during my breaks in the forefront of my mind. 2. It helps me process the experiences at face value and understand what content there is in my psychotic breaks to allow me to recognize thought patterns I need to avoid.

In both of my psychotic breaks, God did not abandon me. He was there on every level each step of the way. Sometimes I was aware at the time, sometimes I wasn’t. In any case, God gave me a lot to handle but never anything more than I could. The same is true today. Always.

-theothersid3

photo credit: Borderline Biennale 2011 – L’Histoire de l’Oeil, François Moncarey & Kevin Ramseier (CENC) acting performance IMG_4165 via photopin (license)

Twelve Years Ago

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Black Fire

Twelve years ago, I was newly diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, reminiscent of bipolar I. I’m now spending a little bit of time reflecting on what that was like at the time.

I remember that every detail had a purpose and God was in control of every aspect of every detail. Every detail, big and small, came from God and I denied myself in the process. It seemed like the Christian thing to do, to deny oneself and give the reigns to God to control.

This added fuel to the raging fires of bipolar problems I was going through at the time. My mood was varying between mania, hypomania, depression, and mixed, sometimes cycling multiple times a minute. One second I feel like things are looking up and God is in control and everything is going to be ok until it hits me and I get a sinking feeling that I will amount to nothing and the pain comes, which is darker than hades itself and all I want to do is kill myself and make it stop.

On top of that, I was extremely confused about who I was. I had no clue, other than that I was successful and intelligent at one point and I felt I was no more. I had lost everything and it wasn’t coming back ever again. I didn’t even like how I looked even though I was a very handsome young man.

My psychotic break was the cherry on top of this whole situation. My mind went places no one could understand. It left me completely and utterly alone, cut off from God. If I were to start thinking about religion or God or start praying, my delusions came back and my mood would skyrocket on the spot. Prayer was of no help. The Bible only fed my delusions.

I was lost in every true sense of the word.

Now, to give you an idea of how lost I was, bring all of the above to the forefront of your mind and don’t stray your attention away from it. All of it happens at once in varying degrees. This was my world, then. It was all I could know and experience for months if not years. Demons followed me and coerced me, God was there and all powerful but controlling and deliberate, yet oh so distant from my mind, heart, and soul to the touch.

I’ll try to put it all together:

I have no idea who I am other than that I’m a loyal follower of God that holds everything in his hands and nothing happens without his say so, but when I try to pray or talk to Him, my heart races and I get an adrenaline rush then my mind starts racing and I have to stop only to keep my head from going up Satan’s ass so to speak, who is also trying to convince me that I’m the second Christ or the antichrist (it sounds silly but all I have to do is say the words and I become more powerful than I can imagine) and he’s using his will power to coerce me into believing one of the two (or both), that is I’m the second Christ or the antichrist, and while all these things are on my mind, my mood is skyrocketing and plummeting by the split minute so God feels so close then so far away the next instant then my mind races again about how I’m such a failure and can’t go anywhere in life and I should just shoot myself now or slice my wrists, but my therapist reminded me that I’m a person who has people in my life who would miss me if I were to die, but it won’t stop and it needs to stop!

It hurt. This was only the surface.

My heart goes out to everyone who has just come out of a psychotic episode. You’re not alone in this experience, no matter how mysterious it was.

It’s good to be back.

photo credit: Beauty Of The Flames via photopin (license)

 

Psychotic Gems

It’s hard to describe how I “got over” or “recovered from” my two breaks, because those words don’t do justice to what’s involved with completely losing one’s mind. It’s a process, though, that’s for sure.

One piece is to learn not to ignore the breaks themselves and not to obsess about them. Ignoring them without processing them or testing them against everyday life and reality will make them grow worse. Obsessing, on the other hand, will keep me from moving on and being able to separate my breaks from my everyday life.

Another piece is that I don’t want to discount everything I experienced as just something of the mind. Conversely,  I don’t want to hold everything I saw as absolutely true in real life. Approaching either extreme will cause great anguish and confusion.

In all things, have realistic expectations.

During my first break, I had crazy beliefs about the people around me. When I tested these beliefs against reality and everyday life, they did not hold up and my delusions began to break down.

Also, It’s hard to talk to people you have half-delusions about after coming back from a psychotic break. Talking with people I knew I could trust was very helpful in clearing up some of my delusions about people.

Some pieces of my breaks took a few years to unravel. An obsession over a certain girl was one of them. That took a 2nd psychotic break to undo the delusions there that happened, 5 years after my first one.

What of the other pieces? I look up into the sky and see a most beautiful spectacle. There are missing pieces which hide the most vital parts that bring everything together. I hold several of the pieces in my hand.

I then live every day outwardly as though I am ignorant. Inwardly, I spend some time in my private life figuring out how these pieces fit, both alone and with close friends.

The pieces I still hold in my hand are the cream of my own little world. The challenge to fill in the gaps will never end till after I die. While my psychotic breaks were fundamentally the harshest things I’ve had to deal with, they are also my greatest gems.

Live Like They Never Happened

I suppose it may be better for me to just move on and forget about my past two psychotic breaks. However, as I learn more and experience more things in life, I’m realizing they play a big part in how my worldview is shaping up. Although it may be true I’ll never understand them till I die, I understand more about them as time goes on. What does not settle well is that it depends on whether the world as we know it ends first or my death happens first. Part of my psychotic breaks dealt with the end of the age and the commencement of the new.

I don’t expect anyone to understand. I continue living life as though nothing happened. I try to be generous, kind, loving, wise, and understanding. In my alone time, I spend some of it pondering all the big questions. I’ve been one to do that most of my life.

I think it’s a happy medium to spend some alone time thinking about my worldview and my breaks how they fit in. If I leave the psychotic breaks alone, then they have begun to drive me up the wall in the past. I have not reconciled the content of my breaks with how I understand reality yet. I still hope to write a book on them, what they were from my point of view and my inpatient notes’ point of view. They are drastically different.

Drastically.

The Key and My Heart

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The key to understanding my psychotic breaks as well as much of the physical universe is understanding the fallacies behind infinite regression and infinite progression. The universe, including you and I, started somewhere and are going somewhere, and those somewheres were the true mysteries that my mind has been exploring.

***

For one, the key is a skeleton key to understanding everything in our experience. It unlocks whatever door you want to open and puts it in a frame of reference: the mysteries of the mind, heart, the self, existence, consciousness, mathematics, distinct objects, behaviors, the past, present, future, all within the known physical and everyday universe – and more. I’ve gone into specifics before in my journals – how the basic idea is necessary for our sort of existence out of endless possibilities, going from completely unstructured to structured and unstructured at the same time, and infinite to finite and infinite at the same time.

It is also a skeleton key to understanding my psychotic breaks. The concept applied to everything my mind could conjure while in those episodes and gave reality a frame of reference. The key kept me from slipping over the edge in my breaks. It was always there and prevalent that everything is significant and contributing to the series of events unfolding before me in my mind, starting from the Big Bang. Everything is significant and is tied together. One example: there cannot be a single person or tree without the metaphysical existence of the number 1 in its essence tied in with each individual person or tree, or each atom that make up the person and the tree. All of these things came from somewhere at a certain point and end up beyond the event horizon at some point.

***

During  my 2nd break in 2009, a care worker on the ward, whom I identified as a Christ (many there were a Christ) asked me, “have you read?” He handed  me my Bible, and I sensed to open it up towards the back of it and Revelation showed up. I read on about the scrolls and the key of David.

The care worker pulled out in his hand a physical gold key, identified it as mine, and he used to unlock the powers of God. He used these powers to fix my heart and the heart of a young woman I fell in love with on the ward. The heart I had in the other realm nearly exploded in my chest from beating so hard. I almost died. I remember clearly, after a thunderstorm brewed and became violent in that realm, an awful lightning strike happened while that worker was restraining the woman. As the worker looked in my eyes, sacrificing part of himself, there was a jolt to my heart when the lightning flashed in the room and a crash of thunder at the same time. I heard the woman cry out in joy, “You fixed me! You fixed me!” I had no idea how important that moment was. My heart no longer threatened to explode. It calmed down in my chest and hurt a lot.

The worker there, who was himself in Christ in that realm, strode over to my side of the ward and forcefully asked me, “Who fixed your heart?” I wanted to take credit, or give credit to that woman, my parents, or that he did it… I could feel the frustration in his mind in my own. He yelled at me, “GOD DID!… God did…” There was a long pause. I thanked the worker after he said, “You’re welcome.” It hadn’t sunk in yet. I climbed into bed and got some precious sleep. I was never the same after that incident.

photo credit: ul_Marga via photopin cc

Phones and Psychosis Part 2: My First Break

In part 1, I described my experiences with phones during my second hospitalization for psychotic mania. My second break was more of a trippy, metaphysical journey I had, and very different from my first hospitalization. During my first hospitalization, I was in hell.

My first break happened while I was on a family Christmas vacation out of state. I completely decompensated on or around Christmas day, and the only place I could go was a seedy crisis stabilization unit. There, the patients were far gone to begin with, and I was in tune with what was going on around me spiritually. It was truly horrifying. Unfortunately, I don’t have my records as a reference point to what was happening in reality, so I just have the memories of what I experienced first hand.

I noticed that when patients would start talking on the phone, they would fade away and start changing into a different person. I didn’t know what was going on at the time, so I just stayed away from the phone. However, curiosity got the best of me, and I tried listening to the earpiece. All I heard were pops, crackles, and a feeling of me being sucked in. I put the earpiece down immediately.

Then it was time for me to see the doctor. When I heard that, all I felt was dread. I sensed he was a truly evil man. When I got in to the room to see him, he basically asked me why I was there. After my manic strings of answers, he replied. I cannot remember his face other than that I saw two voids for eyes and he looked like nothing I had ever seen before. “I can FIX you,” he said. He handed me a phone and told me to talk on it. I refused. He tried pressuring me hard, and I opened the door and ran out.

Later, I had a brief memory of me in a dark room wearing some sort of helmet that someone was dialing in signals that I could feel into my brain. I felt myself going out of my body to some place else, and entering a realm that I experienced later during my second break, verbatim. I saw many things, and I felt like someone was trying to steal me. I fought back hard, and snapped to in the dark room, threw the helmet off, and ran back into my unit.

I believed they were “curing” these people by attaching healthy souls to them, and part of it had to do with the phones they were strongly encouraging people to use.

That psychiatrist prescribed me Geodon. I refused it, because I could never trust a doctor who tells me “I can fix you,” in such a calm, matter-of-fact demeanor; someone whose face I couldn’t see.

Fortunately, they had another psychiatrist on a different day and she seemed trustworthy. I took the Abilify she prescribed, brand new at the time.