Why we carry on

At first it’s panic that gets you through.

Then it’s fear.

Stubbornness will be in there as well.

Maybe spite too when you have nothing else.

One day you’ll have no choice, you’ll be acting on survival instinct.

After that it’s whatever reason you can find to make it through the day.

 

Because you want to.

Because you shouldn’t.

Because time is running out.

Because people are relying on you.

 

Because he said you couldn’t.

Because you won’t let him see your fear.

Because you know he does anyway.

 

Because the sun is out.

Because it’s raining.

Because you can smell the dust on the wind.

 

Because if you do you can go to bed later and have a bit of a cry.

Because it’s just fucking hard, and that is the simplest truth of it.

Because it hurts.

Because if it hurts you can feel something.

 

Because you want to see her grow up.

 

Because this is what you love doing.

Because these are the people you love the most.

Because you can make something beautiful.

 

Because heroes don’t give up.

Because good always triumphs in the end.

Because you’re a Gryffindor.

Because The Dawn will come.

 

For me.

For them.

For her.

For both of us.

For all of us.

 

Because you’ve beaten this before.

Because you survived.

Because you don’t want to die.

Because you do.

 

Because when pain and tiredness and grief and madness have taken their toll, and when all the rest of you is stripped away, when the light is fading and there is almost nothing left of you, in the darkest hours of your life, you will find one tiny golden spark of defiance that will be all you need to carry on. It will make you invincible, unshakeable, and unassailable. And you will beat back the darkness and the demons will flee from the light in you.

 

I’m still in here.

I’m still fighting.

I will not die here.

Laughing at it.

It’s something we all do, us mentally ill people. Laughter is, after all, the best medicine, and has been shown to make you feel better on an empirical level¹. It is also a social includer which has been shown to be almost literally contagious².

In this way, a good laugh can even work towards restoring your brain to the way it should chemically be^3,4 by giving your synapses a little jolt of dopamine when they need it most. Not just that, but all mental illnesses, especially schizophrenia, are isolating factors; a huge proportion of Voices are thoughts that seek to make the hearer doubt their relationships, fostering fear or distrust.

“You shouldn’t go. They only asked you because they want to laugh at you.”

“Why did she say that? She can’t stand you, that’s why.”

Chances are that if you’re in a place where you can ignore those voices and laugh (both geographically and metaphorically), you’re taking the right steps towards healing your head.

I also think that a lot of (but by no means all) sufferers also make a habit of making jokes about their own situation. I certainly do, even to this day, more than three years after my first symptoms.

However, it’s important not to make yourself the punchline of your jokes. I have a terrible habit of making jokes about my schizophrenia to deprive other people of the chance. 99% of the time, they weren’t going to anyway, and it’s my insecurity about what people think of me that makes me do it. Building up a level of trust in other people despite what your voices tell you is a skill that will take time to develop. A skill I still haven’t managed three years after the fact.

As a coping mechanism, however, joking can be great: when you have commanding voices that demand respect, making them the butt of the joke robs them of any power you’d perceive them to have (in a similar vein, Rage Against the Machine is my go-to drowning-out music; “Fuck you, won’t do what you tell me!” is a powerful message to your subconscious).

My worst Voice – the one that sounds like my grandfather – is one of these. He doesn’t want me to suffer precisely, just to know that he has total and complete domination over me. (To give you some perspective, he’s chastising me as I write this because I didn’t capitalise grandfather. Crotchety old fucker). On the worst day of my life, the day I had my first fully involved psychotic break, I saw two of my best friends violently die, and he made me watch. In my reality, I was paralysed, staring at their bodies, covered in their blood for minutes, and then I heard his Voice, clear as day, say:

“Now. Now you can go.”

Still can hear it now. The tone of voice was exactly as I remembered: condescending, cruel and sneering. The cold tone of an uncaring grandparent talking to a terrified, weeping child. I woke up crying in the middle of a busy road.

Fast forward to Group Therapy about a year later.

Our counsellor had suggested treating our voices differently in order to elicit a different response. Ho boy, did I get a different response.

“What?” I said. “Shall I offer him a hug?” I turned to the mirror where I knew I’d feel his presence hovering over my shoulder. “Awww, do you want a hug?”

He went, for complete want of any other word… batshit.

He was livid, the angriest he’d ever been. A thunderstorm of sound and images erupted in my head, damn near ripping it apart. I jumped about two feet in the air out of my seat. It’s quite the experience to have a room full of schizophrenics look at you like you’re the crazy one. I’d heartily recommend it.

Because I had him rattled. It was sudden and definitive proof that he had a weak spot, however small, that I could chip away at. He was no longer invincible. He was no longer this towering demonic figure. (Again, he wanted me to write ‘Godlike’. What a prick). I was seeing him for the first time as what he was, what he had always been in life. A bully. A cruel, sad, angry little man who liked hurting people because it made him feel big. He really, really, didn’t like that.

I genuinely believe that schizophrenia feeds solely on your fear, be it fear of rejection, fear of hurting people or fear of more primal things like darkness, or blood, or puppets. (Maybe not that last one for everyone, I just really hate them). But laughter is a shield that can drain anything that fear can throw at you. I defy commanding voices, for pretty much no other reason than I really don’t like bullies.

Because it’s good for me to say it once in a while; Richard Hand, I am not fucking afraid of you anymore. And because it will make you angry… you are, in fact, my bitch. Boo-yah.

Ow.

Worth it.

 

 

 

 

1: http://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2017/05/23/JNEUROSCI.0688-16.2017

2: http://www.jneurosci.org/content/26/50/13067.short

3: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/519632

4: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1471489214000022

The Skew

I was in the pub a few months ago with a good friend of mine when we first mentioned The Skew.
We were having a few pints on a sunny evening after work and generally discussing life when they mentioned about how doubts about their relationship were taking up a lot more of their thoughts than they otherwise should have been, even intruding into moments when there wasn’t any reason to devote brain space to that issue.
I’m a firm believer that traits that we traditionally associate with mental illness, (paranoia, hallucinations, or in this case, intrusive thoughts) are much more common than the public consciousness would have itself believe. It was a little weird to see a friend of mine, who had always seemed neurotypical, describing my abnormal thought processes exactly in their own thoughts. I’ve said before that our mental illnesses are selfish, and that definitely applies here. I like to think of my nice healthy brain as a bell curve:

The y axis is how much of my brain space  I have to devote to thinking  about things, while the x axis shows how much time I should normally spend thinking about certain things. The area under the graph is the amount of brain space you have to think about things for the day, and can be divided into little parcels of thought on different themes. This is how my brain should work an any given day, divided into nice, responsible, manageable chunks.

In the middle we have things like work, concentrating for eight hours a day on fairly complex systems. Off to the sides we find things like learning lines for shows, or thinking about relationships, needing a fair amount of brain power. A little further on, we find remembering to eat and shower and sleep, activites that actually take up very little conscious thought. Then, at the very extreme edges, there lie all of the inconsequential tiny offhand thoughts that occupy your mind during a day: “Ooh, look, a bird.” ”I wonder where that guy is going?” “Was she looking at you?”
Of course, this is my brain in a perfect world, cleanly defined and delineated. Realistically, during those eight of hours of work, my brain will often drift sideways into thinking about what I’m having for dinner, what the next line of that song is, or how the pattern in the carpet looks. On the other hand, when I’m in the shower or cooking, my mind will sometimes wander to work thoughts. On average, my brain ends up looking like a bell curve, if a slightly lumpy one.

Voice-hearers, of course, will recognise that those last few tiny thoughts are the ones most likely to spiral into obsessions; “Was she looking at you?” can very quickly turn into “They’re all staring at you.”
The point where disruption to your life occurs, whether as a result of mental illness or not, is where we find…

THE SKEW

The skew is where one thought tips the graph of your mind like so:

But as high school maths will tell you, the area under the curve stays the same. Just because you increase the concentration of thoughts about one subject, that doesn’t mean you get more space to think; your bucket of thought for the day won’t get any bigger. In fact, every increase in one area will directly take away from another. With schizophrenia, this can manifest in less attention being given to things like personal hygiene or dressing properly, both  very common symptoms, but even in neurotypical people, a single thought can overtake you and make you obsess to the detriment of all else.

If you’ve ever had someone break up with you, you’ll know something of this; you spend a few days not being able to think of much else, whether cursing them or wishing they’d take you back. Your perception is skewed towards one thought, and that thought takes up space outside of its normal boundaries.

Psychosis, especially in the form of voices, can skew thoughts towards any part of the axis; indeed, one of the scariest things about hearing voices can be when your voices focus on a seemingly random element of thought. This can even make you believe that the thoughts you have have meaning beyond their own, leading to false assumptions about their content: delusions.

 

It’s important to know that The Skew can make a problem seem insurmountable: a problem you spend all day contemplating is surely a problem worth spending a day on, right? But just as worrying about your Skew doesn’t make the rest of the things that need your attention less important, that one occupying thought isn’t unassailable. Often times the best way to deal with a Skew is to… just… wait. Remember your first breakup? I’d bet you’re a lot less broken up about that now, (pun intended).

Don’t sweat the Skew. Worrying about it is normal, even healthy. But don’t let yourself obsess. Sharing your problems with other people puts them into perspective as something that is surmountable and able to be talked about. Even something as simple as leaving the room for a change of scenery can shift your brain out of its rut. Fixating on a problem lets it fester and grow out of proportion, making it seem bigger than it possibly can be.

And Skews don’t have to be bad: falling in love provides one of the biggest Skews of all, as anyone who has ever had a friend with a new relationship will irritatedly confirm. Just remember not to devote too much of your thought bucket to any one thing and you’ll be fine.

And if this rambling tale of buckets, graphs and  frankly amateur psychology leaves you cold, then you’re probably thinking: “Wow… this guy’s got a Skew loose.”

J x

Sleep

Sunday is a busy day. 10 hours of rehearsal being 5 different people, even fiction where I normally seek refuge, is taxing.

I don’t sleep Sunday night: trapped again in the hot stifling confines of my parents’ cottage. I doze off now and then, totalling about three hours.

Monday is the funeral. It’s sad and it’s difficult and it sucks, and it doesn’t help that I drink a bit at the wake. Afterwards is D&D: we’re finishing a story arc and it should be really exciting. The exhaustion and slight drunkenness means I don’t quite do it justice, which leaves a bitter taste of slight disappointment over it.

I don’t sleep Monday night either: the usual nightmares combined with an inadvisable energy drink mean that I’m too alert to sleep, some primal part of my brain waiting for the ambushing night time predators that are surely close by.

Tuesday is back at work, and I’m a zombie. The voices are here as well. I silently thank the fates that there’s some mindless, menial work to do, hoping the rhythm of it will take my mind away from the crowing voices, hot in the back of my brain. It works a bit, but I don’t get above George A. Romero level at any point in the day. Rehearsal in the evening is stressful for many reasons; I get back at 11pm but still need to eat, so I stay up to cook.

The nightmares get bad tonight. Not worse than ever, but I still feel like I’ve been punched in the gut when I drag myself out of bed, exhausted, 45 minutes late, guilt over events that never actually happened cloying over my shoulders like a heavy grey mantle.

Wednesday is a weird one: I’ve slept more, but the voices are louder today. There’s only one other person in the office so I make an excuse about wanting to finish a podcast, and put my headphones on for most of the day to drown them out. This is a coping strategy from a long time ago, and one I don’t like to use, because the voices don’t like me ignoring them, but I’m just so damn tired. I go to rehearsal that evening warily, knowing that they’re being too quiet right now. They stay away for hours until right near the end, when I see someone die. No repetition, no drawing out, just a single blur of downwards motion and an explosion of glass. I know that I’m in for a beating tonight.

Wednesday night I sleep. No nightmares trouble me, but I still dream, something I treasure now. I wake up at 7am… and its quiet. I can’t hear them, even if I try to listen, and I feel… like I’ve slept. Unusually, I have the energy for a shower before work… Jesus, I even still have time to make breakfast. My headphones are out of power, but it doesn’t bother me today.

As I leave the house, the sun is shining ever so slightly. I can feel the cool wind like velvet on my clean skin. I can hear the wind today because I’m not trying to drown Them out with music. It’s beautiful. I bathe in sunlight and wind and the fresh morning air, and they clean the cobwebs and fog and aching fatigue from my battle-weary soul.

 

*             *             *

 

Sleep is a precious commodity; look after it and it will look after you. If, like me, you tend to use computers or phones for a lot of the evening, consider getting a program like f.lux, which takes away some of the blue light that breaks down melatonin, impairing our ability to sleep. I also try to avoid using my bedroom for anything except sleeping; working or writing in there makes it feel like there’s no divide between my active brain and my sleeping brain. Lastly, and I promise you I am the world’s biggest hypocrite for saying this, but maybe lay off the caffeine. That stuff will make you crazy.

 

J x

 

I will not be your monster

*This is adapted from an essay I wrote in my final year of university on the ethics of media representation of minorities*

I want you to sit for, let’s say twenty seconds, before you read the rest of this post, and think of what you think a schizophrenic looks like. Go ahead, I’ll wait here.

If you and those close to you have never experienced schizophrenia, then you’ll probably find that the image you have in your head is quite different from mine. There’s a fair chance that you’ll see something like this:

This is the seventh top image on google images. I don’t know if you’ve seen The Shining, (if you haven’t, do it, it’s a great film), but I don’t recall Jack being stated to be schizophrenic at any point in the film. In fact, I seem to remember that there was a lot of ancient curses, ghosts and demons instead. Therein lies the problem with the public perception of schizophrenia: we are, apparently, monsters.

The 2000 Jim Carrey film, Me, Myself and Irene, typifies this trend; the main character is stated to have “Advanced Delusionary Schizophrenia with Involuntary Narcissistic Rage”¹ (I’m not going to touch on the myriad of things wrong with this here, as it deserves a separate post on its own). From his first indication of any kind of illness, it takes Carrey’s character less than one minute and forty five seconds to go from queueing in a supermarket to driving a car into a crowded barbershop, sexually assaulting a woman, and attempting to drown a child. The tagline of the film is “From Gentle to Mental”. This is in a film that was released with a 15 age rating, marketed at the age group at which the audience is most vulnerable to the development of psychosis.

You might reasonably say: “This was 17 years ago, a lot has changed since then.”

The Voices, starring Ryan Reynolds, was released in 2014, and followed a man who suffered from delusions and hallucinations going off his medication and murdering three woman, one whose decomposing head he keeps in his freezer throughout the film. It is touted as a black comedy, with the tag line ‘Hearing Voices can be Murder’. It holds a 73% rating on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing².

Aside from anything else I want to achieve by typing these words, I’m just fucking sick of hearing and reading things that expect me to be the monster of someone else’s story. Yes, I hear voices and have visions of fire and blood and violence, but I am not going to attack a random person in the street, or abduct people to torture and behead them! Schizophrenia in my opinion, (which I admit may be slightly biased), seems to have a special place of misinformation and vilification in the media, as even the word now conjures images of murderers, slashers and serial killers.

If you asked the average person: “Would you sit next to someone who was clinically depressed on the bus?”, I’m sure most people would say yes, holding a position of sympathy for the poor sufferer. Sufferers of illnesses like depression are seen in the public consciousness as weak, despite actually being the strongest among us.

Now ask the other question: “Would you sit next to a paranoid schizophrenic on the bus?”

We are feared, because we embody every axe murderer and predatory killer the average person sees in the cinema and on TV.

 

15% of all murders in England and Wales between 2001 and 2011 were committed by people who were currently patients under mental health services for any kind of illness^3,4.

By contrast, a person with serious mental illness has a 1 in 4 chance of suffering violence as a direct result of their condition in any given year⁵, most commonly at the hands of a partner, carer or family member. 14 times more likely than the average person⁶.They also have a 5% lifetime incidence rate of successfully committing suicide⁷.

In short, both you and I are much more likely to hurt me than I am to hurt you.

And yet, [this] program was aired by the BBC this week in their show Panorama. Suddenly I’m a Frankenstein’s Monster style killer, my brain addled by the evil drugs that pharmaceutical companies are shoving down my throat.

Unless you have experienced it, you cannot possibly know the fear of losing your mind, your contact with reality. You can’t know what it’s like to hear abusive voices trying to convince you to kill yourself because you are a danger to others. You don’t know what it’s like to feel yourself being crucified as you lie in bed next to the bloodied corpse of your ex-girlfriend who you know can’t really be there.

So stop telling me not to take my meds because YOU are scared they might turn me into a monster.

I’m sick of being someone else’s monster.

And I’m damn sure not going to be someone else’s victim.
 

 

References:

1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127884/]

2: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_voices/

3: https://www.mind.org.uk/media/998781/Violence-and-mental-health-Mind-factsheet-2014.pdf

4: http://www.citizensreportuk.org/reports/murders-fatal-violence-uk.html

5: http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/002203.html

6: https://www.livingwithschizophreniauk.org/advice-sheets/schizophrenia-and-dangerous-behaviour/

7: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2951591/

Dealing with Grief and Loss, with a side of Psychosis

The Voices in our heads are, ultimately, selfish.

“Look at me! Look at me!” “You’re mine!” “You have to do what I say!”

None of this is true of course; we’re real people, while they are misfiring neurons in our brains, but that doesn’t stop them acting like a rude customer in a supermarket and getting served first just because they yelled loudest.

Of course, our Voices, being just part of our brains, are interested in our continued survival, albeit they communicate this in a language that neither of us really speaks. I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon from both my own experiences and from talking to others with respect to guilt.

“It was your fault. You could have saved them. You could have stopped this and you chose not to.”

Grief, as a good friend of mine once said, does funny things to people. I don’t think he meant it would trigger a series of psychotic episodes and an eventual schizophrenia diagnosis, but still. I think however that this kind of hallucination or thought is actually quite common among psychosis sufferers, especially those that have incurred an emotional loss close to the time of an episode. Why though? In a disease this varied and personal, even idiosyncratic, why would a common theme develop?

I think that this is because everyone, even neurotypicals, have the same reaction to loss: guilt. This shows up in Survivor’s Guilt and PTSD, the latter of which I was briefly diagnosed with after the deaths of my friends. However, there is a very slight, but crucial difference between these two thoughts:

“I miss her so much. I wish I could have done something.”

“I miss her so much. I could have done something.”

I think that schizophrenia, and psychosis more generally, plays on fear; our brains are trying to save us from harm in their own misguided way, and they know how best to motivate us. This is how “I’m worried about them,” turns into “They’re in danger, you have to save them!”

Ultimately, when we feel loss, we are programmed at the very core of our DNA to seek to not feel it again. Sometimes, however, like when my friend was diagnosed with Breast Cancer far, far too young, there is nothing you can do. You are helpless, and it doesn’t feel good. So you can do one of two things: blame yourself, and convince yourself that you could have done something, or embrace the uncomfortable fact that life is not controllable, you can’t save everyone, and that your time with those you love is arbitrary and finite, and that you can do nothing to extend it. Which, perhaps, makes the time you do have the more precious for it. Don’t get me wrong, I can see how in some twisted way blaming yourself feels comforting; if you could have made the choice to save someone and didn’t, at least you had agency in that situation. You had a choice.

Feeling helpless is a part of being human, it is a fear in a very deep, lizardy part of our funny old brains, and one that our Voices can and will capitalise on. Don’t listen to the loudest customer in the supermarket. Don’t let fear rule you, and never let your Voices get away with “It’s your fault.” It isn’t. It never was.

As a great man once said:

 

“Non illegitimi carborundum.”

“Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

J x

Video: Roleplaying Gaming as Therapy

Link: Roleplaying Gaming and Depression

 

 

Psychosis for Beginners

A while ago, I was asked to write something for people who, unlike me, are just having their first experience of psychosis. I’ve thought about what to say for a long time, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t talk to you about what you’ll experience; from talking to a lot of good friends I’ve made throughout my illness, everyone’s experience is so different I just don’t think that will be useful. What I do know, is how much I wish I’d had someone to tell me right at the start that this wasn’t the end of my life, and despite all the awful things that I would experience, it didn’t mean that I wouldn’t be happy again.

With that in mind, the rest of this is addressed to Joe, at 7:30pm on the 3^rd of October 2014.

Hey buddy! How are you doing? I know you’re scared, but it’s going to be ok, I promise. About an hour ago, you were walking back from the shop, when you heard your grandad’s voice for the first time in years. He told you to kill yourself. You can feel his words burning in your mind, replying over and over. It doesn’t mean that he can still hurt you.

An hour from now, you’ll walk for four miles trying to convince yourself this isn’t happening, you can’t be crazy. You’ll fight with yourself over whether to tell anyone about this, and you’ll go and find a friend and walk three miles more. By the time you get home you’ll be exhausted, but you can’t sleep because if you do you know something terrible will happen that you won’t be able to prevent. You won’t tell your friends or anyone else about it for two weeks because you’re scared that they’ll call you a freak. A monster. They won’t. You are not a monster.

When you finally do get the courage to talk to someone, things will happen pretty fast. You’ll see a lot of doctors, eight if I remember correctly, in the next three weeks, and you’ll go to some scary, alien places where people will say a lot of long words that just wash past you as you try to control the visions of the fire on the floor and the stab wounds in their chests. It doesn’t mean that any of that is real.

In a month’s time you will have the worst day of your life. You’ll be sitting in the university library, trying desperately to claw the fog from your head enough to salvage your failing degree when the whispers will start up behind you, just underneath your shoulderblades. You’ll text a friend, asking if you can stay there tonight. You’ll make a big mistake: instead of waiting five minutes for the bus, you’ll decide to walk for close to an hour, as the voices overtake you completely. You will arrive at your friends’ house and stab them both to death with a kitchen knife. You’ll see the terrible wounds in their chests and arms, feel their blood on your skin, and smell the stench of iron in the air. You’ll wake up weeping in the middle of a road and run back there, hoping you can save them. Your world will collapse when they open the door, completely fine and very worried. You’ll still see their bodies and smell their blood in your nightmares three years from now. It doesn’t make you a killer.

Your doctor will recommend you start taking medication. The first three days are a comfortable cloud of anaesthesia; you won’t remember if you could hear voices or not, but if you did, you didn’t care. You’ll take a lot of different medications over the next three years, all of them having side effects that leave a bitter aftertaste, and none of them doing anything but muffling the voices. At one point you will be so poor you realise you’ll have to choose between food and medication. You pick the third option, even though the voices tell you not to, and ask a friend for help. I’m proud of you for that.

You’ll tell the rest of your friends about it, and they won’t give a damn. They love you, just as much as you love them, and a tiny quiet part of you will know that you’d feel the same way if they told you all this. They will save your life, because you trusted them.

After a waiting list that was far too long, you’ll start group therapy, and meet a group of people just like you. You didn’t think there were any. At one point your grandfather screams at you so loudly you’ll jump in your seat, and you’ll have the unique and surreal experience of having a group of schizophrenics look at you like you’re crazy. They are some of the best and strongest people you will ever meet, and you will be proud to call them friends.

It will get better from there. You’ll get a part time job to help pay your way through university. You’ll quit after six months because two hours of extra work a week feels like it’s going to tear your mind apart. But soon you’ll get a full time job, and work forty hours a week, and smile every time he says that you’re going to quit. You’ll tell him to go fuck himself a whole lot.

You’ll even fall in love again. You look at her and just for a moment the thunderclouds over your soul part and it will seem like the whole world is made of golden light. You’ll be drunk at a party in two months time and he’ll make you watch her die for eight hours on a TV screen that floats above your head. He laughs gleefully the whole time, drinking in the torture he is inflicting on you. After that, it burns you to even look at her, and you shut off your feelings when she’s around. But you move on, and you fall in love again. A lot. Perhaps too much. But fighting to be able to feel for other people makes you feel better. Gradually, you’ll begin to feel better about life in general, more positive about the future. It doesn’t mean that you won’t wake up covered in blood to find your ex in your bed with her throat slashed, or feel yourself being crucified, or feel rats eating their way out of you. or anything else he can think up. But it does make it hurt a little less each time.

One day you decide you’ll forgive him. He won’t scream, or shout, or resist. You find that when you listen to him, try to understand his concerns and decode what he is showing you, he’ll appear a lot less. You’ll begin to understand that your voices are just another part of your brain, trying to keep you safe and alive just like the rest of it. It doesn’t happen overnight, but you find the strength within yourself each time to thank the voices for their concern, and tell them that you are all safe, that they have nothing to worry about. Do that for long enough, and the voices will retreat back inside your head, until they become almost tame. You’ll still have your danger days, but it will feel like just a part of everyday life. You’ll just be… fine. You can’t remember what life was like before this, but then you can’t really remember the worst days either. You’ll graduate, get a full time job, date a bit, play a crap ton of D&D and finally decide you want to write about your experiences so other people don’t feel like you did back at the beginning.

 

If you are just experiencing psychosis for the first time, please remember this. You are not alone. You are not a monster or a freak, and you are loved, more than it feels possible right now. You do have the strength to seek help, to trust people, and to persevere even when you can’t or don’t want to see it through. I’m not going to tell you that it will be easy, or that you won’t have to fight tooth and nail for every shred of happiness and positivity. But I believe in you. Because I didn’t believe in me.

 

Joseph Hand is a biology graduate, IT specialist and aspiring actor from Southampton, UK. He is an avid tabletop gamer and singer, and is quite partial to the music of Johnny Cash.

His recorded work has been used by the NHS to introduce recently diagnosed psychosis sufferers to alternative therapies, such as roleplaying gaming.