My first episode (Part 2)

The arrival of the torturers.

Photo by Valeriia Neganova on Unsplash

With a no win situation of two possible options, both of which could have equally damaging effects on my young child (remain feeling unsafe or flee and tear the remains of the family apart), my mind began to tear itself apart.

The way I interpret it now is like this: the part of my brain that carefully makes logical decisions had failed to come up with an answer to this impossible dilemma, so my brain just shut this part off completely and let the emergency response take over.

Now for some reason, in psychosis, your brain is unable (for reasons we don’t quite understand) to ever calm down and allow the logical part any control back over your person. So the whole element that makes you “yourself” is no longer in charge, leading relatives to describe you as “you-but-not-you”, for want of a better way of describing it. You are basically a brainstem in fight, flight or freeze mode with no overall control, which is not good news for anyone, and it’s why people in extreme psychosis are so frightening to behold, especially if the individual is a substantial sized person as well.

Back to me age 26. I begin to move. I start to clear some things from my flat. I tell some people, but not others, that I’m thinking about leaving. This does not go down well with anyone and some hint that I’m person of bad moral character. These feelings begin to become internalised and later become the “voices”. I feel frightened by the coldness around me and the lack of compassion for my situation, which couldn’t necessarily be predicted, so why the character assassination?

I feel more isolated than ever and I don’t feel like I have a real friend left in the whole place that I can talk to and who can give me an objective perspective not coloured by hatred for English people (I’m in Northern Ireland long before the Good Friday Agreement was signed). For the first time, I’m genuinely scared about living in the country that has been my home for six years.

I ring my family on the mainland (an admission of failure to become a proper adult as I saw it at that time) - and say I’m thinking of coming over for a while to “see how it goes”. I find a hand written notice on the communal door of my flats saying “please keep this door shut as a rat has been seen trying to get through it”. This is the final straw for my sanity for the next few years. As far as I am concerned, that message is for me about my decision to leave Northern Ireland.

Now I feel in immediate threat that people really do mean me harm. Shame overwhelms me as I (a fully grown adult) ask my father to drive me via my auntie’s house in the Republic to the ferry terminal there. I already think that there are people waiting to kill me if I try to get out of Belfast the usual route.

My mind fragments so badly on this journey down that by the time I get to my auntie’s I am beginning to hear demons.

I’m using these words here because that is what I honestly believed they were at the time because they do not sound in any way like they are coming from you. I feel it’s really important to explain this to people who haven’t experienced this. They do not sound like you. They don’t sound like they are coming from you at all.

There is no point in saying to someone that they aren’t real. They feel very real to them at the time and they are so clear and so different in personality from the sufferer that you will just alienate the sufferer more if you try to say that they are generating these voices themselves. Believe me: if you could hear what they were hearing, you would be just as terrified and disabled yourself as you try to make sense of what is incomprehensible to you (but yet is still happening)- as people ask you to try to engage in a normal day. You need to get a grip of the size of the task you are asking them to accomplish. Imagine if you were trying to talk to one person while someone else whispers something else in your ear at the same time. It’s hard to attend to both and it’s tiring as well. It’s also physically exhausting being in fight or flight mode all day long with no off switch. Anyway, back to me again.

I’m in the kitchen at my auntie’s house (a person I loved and felt safe with as a child) and I’m looking at the kitchen implements of carving knives, mashers, and other utensils stuck to a magnetic strip on the wall by the cooker. “We’re going to run all these through you and we’re going to take our time about it!!!!!! squealed a large group of impish people in my head, shrieking with mutual amusement and glee and delighting in the very idea of subjecting me to shaming torture.

I was terrified. Where were these voices coming from? If they weren’t my enemies, then maybe they were supernatural, since they were inside my head, and who was capable of that? No one can physically get into my head, so that must mean that everything I had rejected as nonsense (heaven, hell, spirits, afterlife, a judging, displeased divine authority) - must be true and I was going to be punished for wrongdoing after all.

I was terrified. I had done my best using my conscience, but I had been judged and found guilty by my peers, by the society I was living in, and now I was facing the ultimate punishment- banishment to hell forever, both in this life and in the next. A feeling of total despair overtook me which is still with me to some extent today. The illness really did destroy my life to some extent, you see.

I’m going to leave poor terrified me back then there for now while I get on with my life in the here and now. I will continue the story as I am able over the coming months. If I can help one person it will be worth it.