A Blog About Psychosis

I want to write a post about being sectioned. the formalities, how it feels, what it means. Somehow the words won't come. All I can seem to say is that I was sectioned under the Mental Health Act a couple of weeks ago, and have just got out of hospital. Thankfully it was a short stay. I don't feel much of anything at the moment. Maybe I should just delete this and try again when things are better. But I think that I started this blog to chart my psychosis journey and this is it. Sometimes this is what it leaves you with.

*I refer to and discuss suicide in this post, so please don't read if you feel it will be upsetting for you.* I was first diagnosed with depression and its close comrade anxiety at 12. I don't remember much about it, apart from I used to cry a lot, and I had a fear of going on buses because I thought everyone was looking at me. The doctor gave me a packet of pills and sent me on my way. I took the pills and although the depression eased it was always there, waiting. Over time I stopped taking the pills. I've never been one for medications and I didn't see the point. When I was 16 and in full time work I had a serious relapse. I couldn't get out of bed, I didn't wash, I didn't eat anything apart from tinned hotdogs (I'm a vegetarian now, and the thought of those hotdogs makes me bleugh) and I began to feel like I had no purpose in life. I went back to the doctor and was put on pills again. Since then I've had an on-off relationship with medicat

I've just been writing an introduction about myself and my experiences for a magazine. It made me incredibly sad, because I've had to think about everything I've lost due to my psychosis. I'm from a poor background, I left home at 14, went to work at 16, and education wasn't really an option for me, as I needed money to survive. As I got older though I was fed up with the minimum wage slog, I wanted something different. I wanted to improve my chances. More than anything, I wanted to learn. I've always been an avid reader, (I can spend hours in waterstones with a pile of books and a cup of coffee), and I adore literature. So I decided to go back to school! I enrolled at college on an access course, and by 2015 I was a mature student at university. Unfortunately that's where it ended. It was 2015 that I first got ill. It crept up on me, took my concentration, my love of books, my ability to write. It took my enthusiasm, my motivation, my vision of a future.

I've been on the 'outside' for four weeks now. No, not prison, I was in a psychiatric hospital for three months. I was there because I had a psychotic relapse. Initially I was staying at a crisis house, which is a place you're taken when you can't be at home but you aren't quite ill enough for hospital. I was sent there by my CPN (community psychiatric nurse) who had noticed things were getting difficult for me. I was struggling with voices, they were loud and giving me commands to harm myself. I did everything I could to resist, tried and tried all the techniques I had learned but still the voices persisted. It's a difficult thing to cope with- it feels very much like they're in control, and it's like you have to do what they say. Eventually I couldn't take it anymore. I barricaded myself into a room and started to do what the voice was shouting at me to do. Luckily a member of staff at the house saw me going into the room and followed me. She

So, I've been on lithium for a week now. I haven't noticed any changes in my mood, but that could be because the dose isn't at the recommended therapeutic level yet. Side effects I've noticed are that I'm struggling to wake up in the morning, and I'm having night sweats. (nice) Tonight I have to stay up until 10pm (late for me!) and take my dose then, because tomorrow morning I have another blood test. The test has to be exactly 12 hours since the dose, so they can measure the amount of lithium in my blood. I also have to carry a lithium alert card round with me. I don't know,  it just makes me uneasy. What exactly are all these drugs doing to my body? Making it better, you may say. But I'm not so sure. Every morning I just feel sad and frustrated that I need to take six pills a day just to function normally. But is this my self stigma rearing its head again? Probably. Perhaps if I had a physical illness I'd just take the pills no question, be

When I first started this blog I must have deleted it about ten times before I hit 'publish'. I was afraid of people knowing my secret. I was afraid I'd be judged, ridiculed, or worse, that I would scare people. Where do these fears come from? Stigma. In general, society has unfavourable opinions around mental health issues. Think about the mainstream media. Words like 'psycho', 'crazy', and 'schizo' are banded around, and are usually used to describe someone who has seriously harmed, or even killed, other people. These sensationalist headlines all add to the stigma people face. When deciding whether or not to disclose a mental health issue, fear is always in the back of your mind. Before starting this blog, hardly any of my friends and family knew I heard voices. They hadn't realised the extent of my psychosis. Some didn't know I suffered with it at all. One of the things that made me decide to write about my experiences was the stigma