Down the Rabbithole Once Again: My Fourth Psychosis

The date was December 3rd 2024 when my fourth psychosis hit. There were no warning signs. I was sitting by my desk, listening to the opera Vide cor meum from Hannibal, and starring into the gaze of Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Lecter. Ben was playing Remnant in the room next to me and came running as I started screamed at the top of my lungs.

Something gave and I don’t know what it was, but the visions I was seeing were real. Horrific visions of murder, much worse than in Silence of the lambs,  overcame me. I was in the forest, running for my life, and there was no way off the island. Around me, my friends were being killed; they were being hacked to death by knives, downed by gun shots, hit by arrows from long bows. We were all wearing trackers and there was no escape. Our hunters were men we knew, men we’d been intimate with. We’d reached the end of the game and it was wicked.

Was I hallucinating or being flooded with memories? In schizophrenia there’s no real difference. We contacted my psychiatrist and I went from 5 to 20mg of Olanzapine over night. We added benzodiazepines. Yet, I was haunted by nightmares. Blood was everywhere and I woke up screaming, night after night. I was unable to shake the hallucinations. To me, the people dying were real. Every night I’d light a candle and sit at the kitchen table, crying in memory of my dead friends. I was stuck in a horror movie.

It’s taken me a year and a half to recover and it’s only now that I can say I once again feel one hundred percent like myself. It took me a month before I could go into the shop without the overwhelming urge to buy everything, two months before I could go back to work and I was lucky to have an understanding boss. Six months before I started watching TV again, terrified of what the images were doing to my mind and also, unable to process them. A whole year before I touched alcohol, which was probably for the better. I stopped eating meat as I always do when I go through psychosis, as I’m convinced there’s a massive subconcious conflict in identifying with animals through an anthropomorphic culture, then eating them.

This has been my most difficult psychosis to deal with because it left me with severe PTSD which has been hard to shake. Once again, it blurred the line between fantasy and reality, and left me wondering who I am. Through all my psychoses, I’ve dealt with the delusions of being other people, ranging from a spoilt brat with too much money to a loving mother. In reality, I’m far from rich and I have no children.

Still, I draw from these personalities like I’m a composite canvas and they all melt together in me, which is far from a united self. We all play different roles in different settings, so perhaps everyone feels this way to a certain extent. What stands out in my case is that I get overwhelmed by alien personalities I’ve constructed that try to overtake me. They speak languages I cannot comprehend and act in ways I would never. Every time one of them visits me, it becomes a little bit more difficult to find my way back to being just me. I’m someone, who’s everyone.