Back in May until start of July 2018, I had a supposed “psychotic episode” according to my psychiatrist. It started off as what felt like an emotional breakdown. It was the last night of college before summer started and I wasn’t in a good mood/drinking as much as my friends. The next day on the train home I had a very low mood and felt myself spacing out. When I arrived into my parents I broke down in front of them, close to tears trying to explain what was wrong with me. I don’t fully recall what I said but I was saying things like my mum and her sisters were all competing against each other (family wise), that me and my friends were never socialised, I was worried that my friends didn’t really like me because I had an eccentric personality, I thought I had borderline personality disorder and I was stressed about getting a summer job (I felt I 100% had to get one). I also confessed to my parents that I took half a pill of MDMA about a month beforehand.
What followed after this I can’t remember the full timeline but I’ll mention everything that happened:
- Constant low mood, worst I’ve ever experienced.
- Literal loss of pleasure in everything I once enjoyed and stopped doing them (hygiene, YouTube videos, reading, texting friends and going out)
- Hypnagogic hallucinations that scared me so much I had to get my dad to sleep in same bed as me.
- Insomnia for a long time
- Dissociation feeling on a few occasions, didn’t feel like I was in my body or had any grasp on my surroundings. This went away though
- Very bad anxiety and zero confidence in. I started a job and felt spaced out and anxious when dealing with customers on check out. I quit after 3 days due to the stress it caused me. The boss told my mum I was like a “rabbit in headlights”
- Biggest thing for me was the inability to concentrate on anything like TV and reading. The World Cup was on at the time and I could literally take in nothing. Just sitting in front of TV with a racing mind.
- Ruminating a lot about everything. Very negative thoughts nothing positive.
- When parents tried to give me sleeping pill one night I thought they were trying to poison me (I had come up with an explanation why but I won’t go into that). They eventually persuaded me to take it and I calmed down.
- Also I thought they were going to maybe push me off a cliff when we were planning to go on a weekend away, but this was a fleeting thought, it didn’t stay with me. (Again I had my own explanation as to why they would)
- We went on a holiday abroad to Poland and I was very anxious, spacing out a lot and thought someone was following us potentially trying to steal our passports, I had a panic attack about this but my parents calmed me down.
- don’t know if anyone knows the meaning to this but my dad is a doctor and he reported to my psychiatrist that I had psychomotor retardation.
- Socially withdrawn in general from friends and family.
- I wouldn’t go out to a neighbourhood party and became very distressed/angry at my mum for being involved with organising it.
- On one occasion a very strange sensation happened, it’s hard to explain. It was like I was entered into a heightened state of panic/fear. A message popped up on my phone and it didn’t pop up in a normal way, it was like it was popping up in a horror film way - very intense and ominous/threatening. My field of vision as it popped up kinda felt like it had a red tinge to it, very alarming feel to it. This went away almost immediately after though.
- The interview I had with psychiatrist before being admitted to hospital I remember very little of, but the last question she asked me was about my siblings, I remember being so emotionally exhausted that talking about something simple like that required a lot of effort. The psychiatrist also seemed exhausted from talking to me.
- I was admitted to hospital and first night just after my parents left I had this big idea in my head that my parents were going to split up because my dad was going to lose his job due to breaking medical rules as a doctor having had me admitted. I didn’t sleep the first night. I basically felt I ended up there by mistake and almost felt like a prisoner in ways. The experience was frightening at the time seeing the other unwell patients. It might have been the lack of sleep but while awake in my room there I could hear my dad in the hallway repeating “Hi, I’m John’s son”. My dad wasn’t there, he was miles away in my relatives house. This didn’t carry on though it was a once off.
- I was on sertraline and olanzapine 10mg for a few days there. The racing/clouded mind stopped after the few days and it felt like I had my own clear mind back, my own thoughts returned, my independence back. My mood was also good and I felt 100% back to normal, able to concentrate on everything, not ruminating etc.
- I was told by the psychiatrist (who is a professor also) that I was experiencing psychosis. I was immediately taken off sertraline and kept on olanzapine 10mg.
I want to know what’s your opinion on what I experienced. In my opinion it could have just been extreme anxiety and depression. As far as psychosis, I’m not sure if what I experienced was voices in the hospital or just my mind playing tricks due to sleep deprivation. Delusions? Maybe the Poland incident but that didn’t last long, it didn’t stay with me. The sertraline or olanzapine (not sure which tbh) did help me to recovery though.
