By Becca Healy

Around 8,000 people a year are diagnosed with their first episode of psychosis. They are mostly in their late teens and early 20s. It is a condition that causes people to lose connection with reality and experience frightening hallucinations and delusions.

In February, I felt amazing. I was on top of the world. I’d just moved back to the city I am in love with. I’d come out of a relationship that I felt I’d processed the end of. I was starting a brand-new course at a journalism college. A course I’d spent ages working towards.

But I couldn’t help the impact of the familiar around me. I was back in the area near wherre I grew up, heavily burdened with sites of trauma I had experienced. All these memories came back to me. It felt like an epiphany of sorts, as I started to weave connections between those memories and how I was feeling.

Loosely, things began to slip. The intensity of the course was leaving me to already feel behind. The shadows of the pain of losing the person I loved most in the world were getting stronger, as I was trying to forge new connections.

I began to lose my grip on sleep. I began to get lost and lose things. I was not myself. I called the GP and ‘111’ complaining of uncontrollable mania. They failed to get back to me.

At my lowest point, I was running late for college and was desperately trying to retrieve my missing wallet back from the bus station. I began to wander and got lost by a river. I was deeply emotional and I didn’t know where I was. A friend gave me the number for the crisis team. I called them and they gave me an appointment, but I was in no fit state to make that journey.

With a film-like quality, a couple of strangers came over to me and offered support. They took me back to their house and made me a sandwich. I felt so disassociated and confused. It was their kindness that took me to my first appointment with the mental health team.

After speaking with the team about how I felt, I returned to where I was living. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t lose enough consciousness to sleep. I was having these incredible epiphanies and thoughts, held with such conviction.

I was lucky enough to be supported by some friends whose paths had seen them witness the start of what was happening to me: psychosis. I was terrified, as I began to realise that was where I was going. I was also paradoxically riding a wave of incessant streams of consciousness that felt unbelievably profound.

The mental health team came over to offer support, but I started to realise I wasn’t safe. I felt my subconscious was taking over and I was becoming less able to connect with my actions. I knew I needed more help than the dribbles of support the home treatment team was offering. I needed to go to hospital.

I took myself to A and E. Shortly after I arrived, I began to hear sirens and other hallucinatory beeping noises. I heard my parents and other people saying my name over and over. I felt like I was back when I had pneumonia when I was just eighteen months old. I couldn’t make it stop. I kept walking in and out of the hospital. The rest of my time there was a blur of hallucinatory visions and noises.

I was put into a private room and my friend turned up to support me. I proceeded to have this incredible dream where I saw so many people from my past and present and heard their voices. I thought they’d shut down the hospital for me. I heard people from my journalism course interviewing other people about me. I saw previous housemates. I thought my most notable ex partners were having a conversation about me. I thought my ex had come to hospital to hypnotise me.

There was a part towards the end of this epic dream which was particularly scary. I was trapped in-between two walls and I couldn’t get out. The dream gave me the kind of headache over consumption of cannabis can give. I felt like I’d taken exceptionally strong edibles.

When I woke up, my friend was there, and I asked her whether what I had experienced was real. She said “no”, but I didn’t believe her. I felt everything was a set up.

I’d already felt that I was being followed a couple of months before this. Whilst I was in hospital, no one was able to charge my phone, and I thought it represented a conspiracy against me. There are some very loose links in my family to an Irish paramilitary group, and I felt people were out to stop me, on this basis.

I had a couple of very difficult crowded nights in A and E. Again, where I saw and heard people that weren’t there. I could not tell what was real and what was not. Then I was taken to a mental health hospital. It was there where I fully lost touch with reality.

I felt like I was in prison, as I saw the hospital differently to how it was. When I arrived there, I saw a huge montage of footage that felt directed at me. It went around in a loop and showed the stages I needed to get through to get better. I thought I might have cancer. This was all constructed by my psychosis.

All the nurses seemed like people I already knew or representatives of people that I already knew. I couldn’t even work out geographically where I was. I thought I was in Leeds, North London or New York. I was actually in a very odd patch of South London on the edges of the beautiful Richmond Park, called Roehampton.

This period of confused reality lasted for around four months. I felt I was being controlled by various people I knew and celebrities. I thought it was a game that I needed to win.

I reached out to so many people from my past and sent letters to people that have no basis in my true thoughts or feelings. I spent thousands of pounds on items that I now am desperate to sell. It was the strangest experience of my life.

Historically, psychosis has often been associated with seeing God. Now people tend to report anxieties around social media. I felt that I hadn’t followed privacy laws on my Instagram and that all my friends thought I was stalking them.

It was extremely frightening when I did not know where I was. At the early part of my admission, I had to have a friend with me to take my medication as I feared I was being drugged and coerced.

I am lucky enough to be on the other side of this ordeal. But the legacy of shame that coexists with recovery is deeply painful, as I have begun to re-trace my out-of-control behaviour that feels so disconnected from who I truly am.

My therapist wisely said, “the last place of refuge when the brain is overwhelmed is the psychotic state”. My brain constructed full scenarios that I believed in and even whole films that simply do not exist.

Getting out of hospital has been tough. The initial buzz of freedom was palpable, but the processing will take a long time. I am now under a mental health team that is due to support me for two years. This shows the extent and breadth of recovery.

I have recently looked back to times when I was experiencing difficult periods of depression. I remember asking my GP if I could be reviewed by a psychiatrist, which was a first step after admission to hospital. He laughed at me.

I believe this is a problem so many people are having. GP mental health support is not enough. In my case, it is well known that people with manic tendencies should not be prescribed antidepressants. I was on a low dose. GPs do not prescribe antipsychotics. I believe this first port of call for depression is failing millions of people.

Upon discharge, I was offered a variety of support options. None of what was offered has transpired. This is keeping many people in a yo-yo system of being in and out of hospital as follow-up care bears no resemblance to minimum care in an acute setting.

I am fortunate enough to be able to afford private therapy. Without it, I do not know how I would be able to adjust to life outside of hospital.

I left hospital with a simple diagnosis of ‘manic psychosis’. I believe this is symptomatic of an incomplete health record that most people with depression have. There are records of appointments of expressing low mood which have led to antidepressant prescription but no clear history building, which means no formal diagnosis can be given.

Overall, there seems to be little known about this condition that affects around 8,000 people a year, usually in their late teens and early twenties.

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