Psychosis

It was a Friday night in October of 2012. While our three kids were in high school, Friday nights in the fall meant that my husband and I were in the football stands. We enjoyed the games, but we were really there to see the marching band perform at halftime.

But this night was different. My husband and seventeen year old son had arrived directly from the hospital. Our son, S., had received a CT scan to see if his paranoid delusions were caused by a brain tumor.

When it came time to march, he performed perfectly, hitting all the notes on his trumpet and keeping up with the beat.

Yet outside of those fifteen minutes, he was barely functioning. He was deeply suspicious of everyone around him. He moved in slow motion, and couldn’t read or really concentrate. He looked terrible.

After marching, he couldn’t find his trumpet case. His best friend’s dad went on the field, found it, and held it open for him. That image is burned in my memory.

S. saw a psychiatrist nine days after he first showed signs of psychosis. One of his delusions was that I was evil. He refused to look at me. The doctor prescribed Abilify, and within a half hour of taking it, he looked me in the eye and smiled.

The psychiatrist wanted him to stay home from school. But my husband and I campaigned to have him attend his first hour class, which was band. My husband sat in the back of the class. S. couldn’t lift his head to take in the room. But once again, he could play his trumpet.

After he successfully marched in a competition, I asked him how he managed. “Muscle memory,” was his explanation.

He attended classes in the computer lab for the second half of the year. He went to prom with his best friend, riding in a limo with a bunch of kids. At his senior supper, there was a mock Academy Awards ceremony. His classmates voted him Best Music.

The other winners swaggered and mugged through their speeches, as kids will do. But S. said, “Thanks, everyone. I’ll miss you.” The simplicity of those words touched people.

Over one hundred people came to his graduation Open House- the same number as his older brother. Somehow, his illness didn’t alienate anyone. He even grew closer to his best friend.

The psychiatrist balked at his college plan, which was to live in an off campus apartment with his brother and two friends. But once again, my husband and I believed that he would be ok. He was accepted into the college’s marching band, and joined a music fraternity.

The life that had been shattered a year previously was mending. S. was thriving. His psychiatrist called him one of his biggest success stories.

Today, he is thirty years old, but in some ways still stuck in adolescence. He is self-absorbed, constantly trying to sort out his identity. He doesn’t make enough money to live on his own, and he’s never had a serious relationship.

But his life could be so much worse. I’ve talked with him about the role that music has played in his recovery. I’ve researched it, but I haven’t found a specific study about its effect on schizophrenia. I really believe it’s healed his brain.

S. also plays keyboard and has tried guitar. He’s taken voice lessons, and joined a community choir and a community band. He was a writing major, and he’s dabbled in short stories. Lately, he’s been serious about macro photography. He likes to draw and has tried painting.

I had an epiphany yesterday. The positive symptoms of schizophrenia- delusions, halluciations, hearing voices- are often resolved by medication. But negative symptoms like a lack of motivation, depression, and a flat affect are much harder to treat.

My realization was this: I think S. has an instinct to avoid passive ways of spending his free time. He dislikes watching TV, and he often wants to create music instead of listening to it. He may know somehow that he needs to have active engagement in things so he won’t lose function.

So maybe music has saved my son. I don’t know for sure. But a cool thing is that his best friend has a tattoo of a trumpet behind her ear to honor him. He really does play the best music I’ve ever heard.

#Bipolar #Depression #GAD #OCD #PTSD

Good morning, I hope you’re doing well today and you have a wonderful week ahead.

I am diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and Psychosis. Here is an account of an episode where I was hearing voices. I initially posted it on my blog so I’ve edited it to make sure it is compressible to read.

Looking back a few months ago now, I had two episodes were I was hearing the voices in my head once again. Nothing sinister or anything like that, nor a command to do anything detrimental. Literally the situation was that I walked up to the pub about 1pm each day to me a friend. I had my MP3 player (I know they went out of fashion years ago), and I just use the right earphone as I’m deaf in my left ear. So, I was beginning to hear chatter. Nothing clearly but it was like I was in a pub or restaurant or something like that and I could hear the conversations of the people around me. It doesn’t worry me, or scare me as I’ve experienced this before, I have had these voices from years and years ago and to me at least, I know they aren’t dangerous to me or sinister. So I even took my hearing aid out of my left ear to see if they were coming through that, but no, I was still hearing them. I got to the pub and then turned off MP3 player and then chatting with my friend and then it all stopped. I walked home afterwards though and then it started again.

A few days later I had to collect my prescription from Mountcroft (Mental Health Resource Centre) for extra Quetiapine. So I met a mate near my house and we walked up to the promenade by the sea front and then to the next town where the Resource Centre is, and I collected the script. No voices at all.

So at the time I was then on 750mg per day of Quetiapine! 250mg when I get up and 500mg before bed! (Update: The Quetiapine didn’t work and it was discontinued in favour of Olanzapine)

I’ve noticed that I think it is more prevalent when I was silent in my mind and the thoughts weren’t racing when it happens. Basically when I’m Bipolar Manic I have too much going on to hear the voices.
It’s crazy isn’t it that I have now experienced a new scenario. I would try to see if it would happen if I had both earphones in my ears, but as I said I cut the left earphone off as it was redundant. After spending a small fortune on earphones over the years I’m not spending any more money on another set! 🤣

I wish I could have a way to record my voices and then be able to put them together in a download or something like that so people can have a listen to my voices and then they can get a better understanding of what it is like to have mental illness.

#MightyTogether #MentalHealth

When I go into a Bipolar Mania or Bipolar Depressive state, I feel things and my emotions and my expression returns. It’s at this moment that I can do some writing, practice my guitar, continue teaching myself Portuguese and Spanish, be able to socialise a little more and be what most of you would describe as normal. But then again, the truth is that I’m not wired up like the rest of you. My medication I take for control of my mood swings, my Psychiatrist says is well balanced and ‘working’. When I’m not in either of the two moods (depression or mania) and I’m said to be ‘functioning’, I’m actually just completely numb. Numb to emotions, numb to everything you take for granted. It’s like someone switched off your connection to the world. It’s like the saying that “The Lights Are On But Nobody Is Home”.

So, I looked at the medication I take; I have an antipsychotic called Olanzapine which is used in the treatment of Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder, and I have an antidepressant called Fluoxetine, which works very well in combination with Olanzapine, and I take a mood stabiliser to help me stay level called Lithium. But it’s not a cure for Bipolar Disorder, it’s simply just a remedy that works in reducing the severity of your mood swings to manageable levels but it doesn’t reduce the frequency of them.

When you have an episode of depression or mania I feel that it is like you are functioning, and that you have productivity and purpose once again. I am currently experiencing a high phase, the mania, which is manageable but it is still very erratic. Writing this for example is proving difficult as I’m trying to write the next paragraph before I have finished writing the current one.

Writing however became my primary coping mechanism for my mood swings and the panic I was unable at the time, to ride out.
When the psychosis started I felt weak. That I wasn’t in control of myself. The voices that got louder the more you tried to ignore them. It started with only a solitary word that I wrote. Not enough to keep the audience in my head from heckling me but I was able to start thinking about the words and not the nonsense going on in the background. Slowly the one word became two words, which then became three, and so on until I was able to write full sentences. From these I tried to make a paragraph out of them and join them together as best I could. This was because the words I had written weren’t really in any narrative form that was comprehensible to understand.

Since I started using this method to cope with the erratic nature of mania and psychosis, I have written 27 songs, about my bipolar perspectives on a unipolar world, the illness itself and the associated things that it brings. I started blogging in 2021 with the intention of creating a scrapbook if you will of all my thoughts and feelings about different things I have experienced, and if my Bipolar had any influence on my perspectives and opinions. I found that writing was the best way to cope with my extremes of Bipolar as it occupied my mind, and focused my attention on the writing and away from the nonsense that I had reverberating around my head. I have written 3 short books too which are a continuation in general of my blogs. I’m under no illusion about these being any good or great pieces of musical lyricism or profound literature, but I am proud of myself for doing it. For me though, it is an example of how you can make a negative situation become a positive one. I don’t have the answers for anything about Bipolar Disorder but I do have some insight into how to deal with things that might occur when you suffer from its effects, that I can potentially and hopefully, offer to others a new perspective on how to deal with the effects that are happening.

I have been a far worse person than most people. By this I mean that I can potentially help others and resonate with them in their journeys, as I’ve climbed out of the abyss of deep, dark depression and I’ve fallen from the highest echelons of the unrelenting madness of mania, from which I can now tell my story of how I attempted to get out of it, and maybe even give someone a chance to do it too.

#MightyTogether #MentalHealth