Source: © Dreamstime.com - Screaming man

I’m going to start off by posting an excerpt from a fellow blogger who writes in the United Kingdom. Her name is Elisabeth Svanholmer and the title of her blog is “Beyond Meds: Alternative to .” The title of this particular post is “Learning to be with ourselves: a response to Understanding .”

I’m posting this excerpt first because I want you as the reader to form your own opinion. I don’t want to you with my response to Ms. Svanholmer’s writing.

“So when I hear and feel things that scare me I grab my instrument of reason and analysis and I beat the experience into a shape I can understand. I turn to my arsenal of boxes and shove that voice, this sensation or overwhelming emotion into the box that looks the best fit. And I will get some peace for a while. I am on top of things again. I am in charge of my inner life. The explanations and the coping strategies offer me a sense of power and control. I may even be less afraid; I gain some that I will be able to handle my experiences in future. I have got my boxes ready.

But some of my experiences completely refuse to be defined by me. They scream as if I am hurting them by trying to explain them. They will change shape, size and content to elude my cognitive grasp on them. They just want to be as they are, whatever they are without my intellectual interference. They don’t want my kindness or my . They are just life expressing itself through me and me trying to make sense of them is almost like me putting a knife to my mind and then exclaiming ‘ah see it was a cut all along’.”

You can read the entire post of “Learning to be with ourselves: a response to Understanding Psychosis” here.

Understanding Psychosis is a report that was published in the United Kingdom about the experience of psychosis and its various aspects. I have read it and found it to be interesting and I found it to contain different and open ways of thinking. You can read the entire report here. I suggest you be prepared to devote a substantial amount of time to it or read it in chunks as it is over one hundred pages.

When I was in the hospital for the second time last year following my attempt, in April of 2014, I experienced psychotic symptoms. They were delusions, beliefs about situations that I believed in some respect to be true. They were not. For me, they were incredibly frightening and distressing. I didn’t tell the nurses or the doctor for several days after they first surfaced.

At the time I wasn’t on any because the head of the unit I to which I was admitted, which was dedicated to , believed that my was more characterological rather than pure symptom-based. When the psychotic symptoms developed I kept hoping for an anti-psychotic medication to help relieve the delusions for they were torture. I wasn’t enough to ask for one though and the psychiatrist didn’t offer one.

I believe the doctors felt that the psychosis was a symptom of the (BPD) which it can be. This is the last criteria of BPD as stated in the booklet “Borderline Disorder” from the National Institute of Mental Health: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“Having -related paranoid thoughts or severe dissociative symptoms, such as feeling cut off from oneself, observing oneself from outside the body, or losing touch with reality.”

I remember that it was freezing cold in my room and I wanted to stay in there and sleep all day because I was very depressed and , and it was easier to stay in my room (I had a single room) rather than being up and about on the unit with all the other patients and all the noise. There was a grate in my room where the cold air was blasting from and I believed that the staff on the unit had told the maintenance workers in the basement to turn the cold air on full force and direct it only into my room to freeze me out because they didn’t want me isolating in there.

To combat this delusion I retrieved three or four blankets from the laundry cart at the end of the hall and put on sweat pants, two sweatshirts, two pairs of socks and huddled under the covers trying to nap, crying myself to sleep because I was so convinced that everyone was against me.

The odd thing, and later my outpatient psychiatrist and therapist Dr. Adena (not her real name), commented on this with some wonderment and also some disbelief, is that there was some glint of light in my brain, a sliver that was aware that these were delusions and I was psychotic. In my clinical mind I had diagnosed myself as major depressive disorder with psychotic features. That was the diagnosis that first came to mind, and that was in fact the diagnosis that was eventually given to me when I left the hospital and was finally prescribed an anti-psychotic medication.

The website PsychCentral states that those with psychotic depression can be aware of their psychosis. In an article titled “Psychotic Depression” by National Institute of Mental Health, it states that “…those with psychotic depression are usually aware that these thoughts aren’t true. They may be ashamed or embarrassed and try to hide them, sometimes making this variation difficult to diagnose.”

From: http://psychcentral.com/lib/psychotic-depression/

So when the resident (this was a teaching hospital) in an interview, several days later inquired if I was experiencing any psychotic symptoms, I hesitated, out of and tugged at my sleeve. She asked me about my hesitation and I paused again. Gently she encouraged me to speak and I was able to tell her that yes, I was deep in the throes of psychosis. But I was not able to ask her for medication.

I remained embarrassed by these psychotic symptoms for a long time and told no one, not even my brother. I didn’t want anyone to know that I had experienced them and I didn’t want anyone to know that I was taking Risperdal, an antipsychotic medication.

Reading Ms. Svanholmer’s post caused me to rethink my shame and my reluctance to be forthcoming. I encourage you to read it in full. Reading the report Understanding Psychosis also gave me pause. For the first time I came to view psychotic thoughts as neither good nor bad, just something to be experienced and interpreted as I chose. For me, this is a novel approach. For over a year I lived with the belief that I needed to hide my experience with delusions from the world. Now I am thinking differently.

I have been on the same dose of Risperdal for a year. Dr. Adena has asked me to think about lowering it slightly. I’ve kept putting her off because I was scared that the delusions would return. Now I think that I’m ready and I intend to discuss it with her at our next session. It’s been her contention that it was the stress and experience of the depression that caused the delusions and now since that situation has been resolved, I don’t need to be on such a high dose of the Risperdal, if at all.

One step at a time.

Disclaimer: The disclosure of my use of medication is for informational purposes only. Discuss making any changes to your medication regimen or starting any new medications with your physician before taking any course of action.